The Franchiser (21 page)

Except for the eternal flames, Columbus was black till the sun rose.

So it was not the first time he was fooled. Nor the last.

The last—he stayed on three days in Hays, Kansas, because in the morning the power came back on; he was very tired, exhausted; he needed the rest—was the evening of the day he decided to leave Hays. At five o’clock the power failed again. Rested—he felt he could drive at night once more—he climbed back into the Cadillac and returned to Interstate 70. His gas cans—screw the hick pumps, he’d decided, and had accumulated the twelve cans by then and had had them filled—were in the trunk, his grips and garment bags again on the backseat. He’d eaten at the motel and was ready for the long drive west. (He’d decided to go to Colorado Springs.)

After the layover in Hays it was pleasant to be back on the highway again, pleasant to be driving in the dark, pleasant to be showered, to wear fresh linen, to be insulated from the heat wave in the crisp, sealed environment of the air-conditioned car, to read the soft illuminated figures on the dash, the glowing rounds and ovals like electric fruit.

He leaned forward and turned on the radio, fiddled with the dial that brought up the rear speakers, and blended the sound with those in front. His push buttons, locked in on New York and Chicago stations, yielded nothing but a mellow—he’d adjusted the treble, subordinating it to the bass—static, not finally unpleasant, reassuring him of the distant presence of energies, of storms, far off perhaps but hinting relief. He listened for a while to the sky and then turned the manual dial, surgical—and painful, too; this was his right hand—as a ham, fine tuning, hoping to hone a melody or a human voice from the smear of sound. It was not yet nine o’clock but there was nothing—only more sky.

But of course. I’m on FM, he realized when he had twice swung the dial across its keyboard of wavelength. He switched to AM and moved the dial even more slowly. Suddenly, somewhere in the soprano, a voice broke in commandingly, overriding the static and silence. Flesh turned up the treble. It was a talk show, the signal so firm that Ben assumed—he had left Kansas and crossed the Colorado line—it was Denver.

“The Dick Gibson Show. Go ahead, please, you’re on the air.”

“Hello?”

“Hello. Go ahead, please.”

“Am I on the air? I hear this guy.”

“Sir, turn your radio down.”

“I can hear this guy talking. Hello? Hello?”

“Turn your radio down or I’ll have to go to another caller.”

“Hello?”

“We’ll go to a commercial.”

There was a pause. Then this announcement:

“Tired of your present job? Do you find the routine boring and unchallenging? Are you underpaid or given only the most menial tasks? Then a job with the Monsanto Company may be just what you’re looking for. Monsanto Chemical has exciting openings with open-ended opportunities for men and women who have had two years’ experience in the field of Sensory Physiology or at least one year of advanced laboratory work in research neurophysiology. Preferential treatment will be given to qualified candidates with a background in ethnobotany and experimental cell biology, and we are particularly interested in specialists holding advanced degrees in such areas as the determination of crystal structures by X-ray analysis, kinetics and mechanism, or who have published widely in the fields of magnetic resonance, molecular orbital theory, quantum chemistry, and the nuclear synthesis of organic compounds. Applicants will be expected to have a high degree of competence in structure and spectra and advanced statistical mechanics. Monsanto is an equal-opportunity employer.”

“The Dick Gibson Show. You’re on the air, go ahead, please.”

“Dick?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dick, I’ve had this fabulous experience and I want to share it with your audience. I mean it’s a believe-it-or-not situation, a one-in-a-million thing. It’s practically a miracle. Can I share this with your audience, Dick?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Yes. Thank you. Well, to begin at the beginning, I’m a brother.”

“A brother.”

“Yeah. But you see my parents split up when I was still a little kid and then my mom died and my father was too sick to take care of us, so my brother and me were farmed out to different relatives. What I mean is, I went with my mother’s sister, my aunt, but she couldn’t take care of the both of us so my brother went with an older cousin. I was six and my brother he must have been around eight at the time. Well, my aunt married a soldier and they adopted me legally and he was transferred and we pulled up our roots and we moved with him, and I was, you know, what do they call it, an army brat, going from post to post with my aunt and my new father, the corporal. He was a thirty-year man and we like traveled all over, pulling up our roots every three years or so, and when I was old enough to leave the nest I got a job with this company, and as time went on I met a girl and we dated for a while and finally we decided to get married. Now we have children of our own, a boy seven and a cute little girl four.

“Well, sir, I’m with the J. C. Penney store, and I made a good record and Penney’s opened up a new store in the suburbs and about a year ago my department head asked me if I’d consider moving to the new store with the idea in mind that I could train the new kitchen-appliance salesmen and be the head of the department and run my own ship. Well, of course when an opportunity like that opens up, you jump at it. Opportunity knocks but once, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” Dick Gibson said. “What are you getting at, please?”

“You mean the miracle?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s what I was getting at. Yesterday a guy comes in for a present for his wife’s birthday. He was thinking in terms of a toaster, but he didn’t know exactly what model he had in mind, so I asked him if he had kids and he said yeah, he had two kids, twin boys, ten years old. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘in that case you probably want the four-slice toaster.’ That’s our Ezy-Clean pop-up job with an adjustable thermostat control and a crumb tray that opens for easy cleaning in a handsome chrome-plated steel exterior. I have the same toaster in my kitchen.”

“Yes?”

“Oh yeah. So he asked to see it and I showed it to him and I told him that he could compare it to any model on the market at the price and it couldn’t be beat and that’s the truth. Well, to make a long story short, he went for it. I mean, it was just what he had in mind without knowing it and I asked, as I always do, if it would be cash or charge. He said charge. I asked if he wanted to take it with or have it sent. He said take it with. So he gave me his charge plate, and when I went to my machine to write up the sales slip, I couldn’t help but notice when I read his charge plate that he was my brother.”

“Really?”

“My long-lost brother.”

“That
is
a coincidence.”

“Wait. When I went back, I was like shaking all over and he noticed it and he asked what was wrong and I said, ‘Are
you
Ronald L. Pipe?’ And he says, ‘Yes. What about it?’ And I tell him, I tell him I’m Lou B. Kramer!”

“Oh?”

“Well, I expected him to fall down in a dead faint, but he doesn’t bat an eye. Then I realize, I realize Kramer’s my
adopted
name, my stepfather’s name, the corporal’s.”

“The thirty-year man’s.”

“Right. And it’s been, what, twenty-eight years since we laid eyes on each other. He’s bald, and I’m prematurely gray and I’ve put on a little weight from all that toast. Of
course
we don’t recognize each other. So I tell him his history—our history—that when he was eight years old his folks split up and his mom passed away and he was raised by an older cousin. ‘Can this be?’ he asked. ‘How do you know this?’ And I explain everything, who I am and everything, and that if he’d paid cash or if it hadn’t been for my habit of reading my customers’ names off their Charge-a-Plates we’d never have found each other to this day.”

“Well,” Dick Gibson said.

“Wait. That’s just the beginning of the coincidence. I punched out early and we had a couple of beers together.”

“I see.”

“We both drink beer!”

“Gee.”

“We’re both married and have kids!”

“How do you like that?”

“His wife’s birthday is the day after tomorrow!”

“Oh?”

“
My
wife was born in the springtime, too!”

“Hmn.”

“We both
bowl!
”

“You both do?”

“I average 130, 135.”

“And he averages?”

“About 190.”

“Do you have anything else in common?”

“We’re both Democrats. Neither of us is a millionaire.”

“I see. Well, that’s really—I’m going to have to take another—”

“
We both watch Monday-night football!
”

“—another…”

“When we go out with our wives—when we go out with our wives—”

“Yes?”

“
We both use babysitters
!”

“…call.”

“
Neither of us has been in prison; we both like thick juicy steaks. Dick, Dick, both of us, both of us drive!
”

“Thank you, sir, for sharing your miracle. The Dick Gibson Show. You’re on the air, go ahead, please.”

Flesh couldn’t stop laughing. Things would work out. He left Interstate 70 and turned off onto U.S. 24 to drive the remaining eighty or so miles to Colorado Springs. At Peyton, Colorado, where his headlights ignited a sign that read C
OLORADO SPRINGS
, 24
MILES
, the signal was so powerful that he might have been in Chicago listening, say, to the local station of a major network.

When he was almost there, there was a station break. “This is Dick Gibson,” Dick Gibson said, “WMIA, Miami Beach.”

Then he panicked. It’s not, he thought, because it’s so close that it’s so clear,
it’s because all the other stations have failed!
It’s because America has everywhere failed, the power broken down!

And that,
that
, was the last time he was fooled.

Yet the lights were on in Colorado Springs.

Colorado Avenue was a garden of neon. The lights of the massage parlors burned like fires. The sequenced circuitry of the drive-ins and motels and theaters and bars was a contagion of light. A giant Big Boy’s statue illuminated by spots like a national monument. The golden Shell signs, an old Mobil Pegasus climbing invisible stairs in the sky. The traffic lights, red as bulbs in darkrooms, amber as lawn furniture, green as turf. The city itself, awash in light, suggested boardwalks, carnivals, steel piers, million-dollar miles, and, far off, private homes like upturned dominos or inverted starry nights. Down Cheyenne Mountain and Pikes Peak niagaras of lights were laid out like track. Don’t they know? he wondered. Is it Mardi Gras? Don’t they know? And he had a sense of connection, the roads that led to Rome, of nexus, the low kindling point of filament, of globe and tubing, as current poured in from every direction, rushing like electric water seeking its own level to ignite every conductor, conflagrating base metals, glass, the white lines down the centers of the avenues bright as tennis shoes, stone itself, the city a kind of full moon into which he’d come at last from behind its hidden darker side. The city like the exposed chassis of an ancient radio, its embered tubes and color-coded wire.

He drove to the Broadmoor Hotel and checked in. Only a suite was available. That was fine, he would take it. How long would he be staying? Open-ended. A bill would be presented every three days. That was acceptable. They did not honor credit cards. No problem. He would pay by check. He could give them two hundred dollars in cash right then if they liked. And was willing to show them his money. That wasn’t necessary. All right then. Could he get a bellboy to help with his bags? He was tired. Then he could go to his rooms at once. The boy would take his car keys and bring his bags up when he had parked Mr. Flesh’s car for him. Fine. His suite was in the new building. The new building, was that far? Oh no. Not at all. Another boy would show him the way. That was fine. That was just what he wanted.

He tipped his guide two dollars and sat on a Georgian chair by a white Georgian desk and put a call through to Riverdale.

He shoved the cartridge into the stereo and dedicated it aloud to Irving’s wife, Frances.
My Fair Lady
took him past St. Charles to Wentzville,
Candide
, played twice, to the Kingdom City exit,
West Side Story
to Columbia, where he ate lunch. He put his ’74 Cadillac through the Kwik Kar Wash. It cost him seventy-five cents and, as far as he could see, did no better job than his Robo-Wash in Washington, D.C., which took no longer and was a quarter cheaper. The difference—though there was no one ahead of him now—would have to be in customer convenience. His lot was shallower, the washbarn closer to the street. His customers, when there was a line, had to wait in the street. That meant a few bucks off the top to the cop every week. This guy’s machinery, set off to the side at the rear of his lot, permitted his customers to form a sort of U-shaped line, maybe eleven cars long, no, twelve or thirteen—he hadn’t allowed for the cars at the pit of the U—before they backed up into the street. Still, the sharp turn they had to make at the back of the lot to get into the barn must have chipped plenty of fenders. The management had put up a “Not Responsible” notice, but Flesh could guess how much that was worth. The insurance company would hassle him plenty, and why not? The customer couldn’t read the disclaimer until he had already committed himself, made or begun his turn into the narrow passageway, and it was too late, particularly if there was a strand of cars behind him, to back out. Sure. Six of one, half dozen of the other. The guy could keep his extra twenty-five cents. Flesh would rather deal with cops than insurance companies any day of the week.

What the hell was he thinking about? He’d dumped his Robo-Wash two years before. A mistake from the first. Strictly a novelty. A place to give kids the illusion—sitting in their cars while foamy water shot at them from all directions—that they were snugly drowning in the sea, and the illusion, as giant brushes like rolls of carpet rose up from the floor and left the wall, that they were being softly crushed. A novelty. A ride. Family entertainment. And never mind the self-creating traffic jams, not that there could have been that many. He’d picked a lousy location. Washington was black. Those people cared for their cars, polished them like flatware, either doing it themselves or, going the other way, springing for two-fifty and three-dollar jobs. He couldn’t have had the Robo a year.