Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

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.”

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.