Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

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.”