Stanley Elkin - The Franchiser

“He’s never seen it?”

“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.”

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!”