The Franchiser (19 page)

“Me and my trademarks. I’m the guy they build the access roads for, whose signs rise like stiffened peters—Keep America Beautiful—beyond the hundred-yard limit of the Interstates. A finger in every logotype. Ho-Jo’s orange roof and the red star of Texaco. D.Q.’s crimson pout and the Colonel’s bucket spinning, spinning. You name it, I’m in it.

“So. Doomed. Why? Shh. Because I am built to recognize it: a lip reader of big print and the scare headline. Because I’m one of those birds who ain’t satisfied unless he has a destiny, even though he knows that destiny sucks. How did I get this way? I used to be a kid who ate fruit.

“Anyway. As I was saying. You know what? You know what I think? Shh. Hush. I think you’re dead. Don’t bother to correct me if you’re not. That’s what I think. I think you’re dead there behind your screen, that you’ll never see Guernsey. The dramatic lines demand it. Theatricality’s gravitational pull. Who are you to go against something like that? You’re too weak. You have to be strapped to your chair, for God’s sake. So. It’s nice how you can let your hair down with strangers. We were strangers, right? Have we ever met, sir? Do you know me; has there been communication between us in any way, shape, or form; have we gotten together before the show; have promises been made to you?
Thank you very much, sir. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen
.

“So it’s agreed. We’re strangers, locked each into his own symptoms, you into Lassa fever and me into my sensory problems. And somehow, as strangers will, somehow we got to talking, and gradually understood each other. I wiped your blood up. You saw my asshole with its spoor of shit. Well, strangers get close in such situations. Now I have my dirty bill of health and I’m told to move on and Dr. Gibberd tells me you’re for Guernsey when your orders come through. And here’s where I’m supposed to go behind them screens and shake hands. Well, I won’t! I won’t do it. That ain’t going to happen. Because you’re dead! Slumped in that queer way death has of disarraying things. So that’s it. The destiny man thinks you’ve been put here on earth to satisfy one more cliché, to be discovered stone cold dead in a Rapid City General wheelchair. For what? So one day I’ll be able to say in my impaired speech—‘There wash thish time in Shouf Dakota, and I wash on the shame woward wi-with thish young chap from the R.A.F. (He called it “Raf.”)—And we got pretty close. The two of us. There was a terrible heat wave and neither of us could sleep. We were kept up half the night by the screams of mental patients who couldn’t be quieted because the power was out, and even though the hospital had its own auxiliary generator, there wasn’t enough power for electric-shock treatments, so we told each other the story of our life, as fellows will in hospital, and got pretty close to each other, and finally I was discharged and I went over to young Tanner’s screen to say goodbye and found him dead.’

“Well, fuck
that
, Lieutenant! I like you too much to use you around fireplaces. We’ll just skip it because I ain’t going behind no screen to make certain, because if you
are
dead, by Christ, I don’t think I could take it. I would grab a scissors and cut the lines of my drama. On the other hand, please don’t disabuse me of my sense of the fitness of things. Keep still just. So long, dead guy.”

He turned and started to the exit, but just as he got there he heard a loud, ripping, and unruly fart. Well, how do you like that? he thought. What was it, the critique of pure reason? Or only the guy’s sphincter relaxing in death? Flesh shoved hard against the handle on the fire doors.

He was like a refugee now. A survivor, the last alive perhaps, the heat a plague and waiting for him in his late-model Cadillac baking in the hospital’s open parking lot. He unlocked its doors and opened them wide but did not step in. Whatever was plastic in the car, on the dash, the steering wheel, the push-button knobs on the radio, along the sides of the doors, the wide ledge beneath the rear window, had begun to bubble, boil, the glue melting and the car’s great load of padding rising yeast-like, separating, creating seams he’d been unaware of before, like the perforations on Saltines.

What has happened to my car?

It was as if an earthquake had jostled its landscape. Things were not aligned.

He feared for his right, hypersensitive hand, its stripped nerves like peeled electrical wire. If he touched anything metal in the automobile, if he so much as pressed the electric window control, it would ignite. He waited perhaps ten minutes, stuck his head inside to see if the car had cooled off. Imperceptible. Leaving the doors open, he walked back inside the hospital and went up to a fourteen-or fifteen-year-old boy who was sitting in one of the chairs in the waiting room.

“Kid,” he said, “I’ll give you five dollars if you start my car for me and turn the air conditioning on.”

The boy looked at him nervously.

“It’s all right. Look. Here.” He held the money out to the boy. (It was difficult—his fingers had no discrimination left in them—to separate the bill from the others and remove it from his wallet.) “It’s right there on the lot. You can see it from the window. The Cadillac with the doors open. I’ve just been discharged from the hospital. I’m not supposed to get overheated. Please,” he said and started to leave, turning to see if the boy was following. He had not left his chair. “Well?” Flesh said. “Won’t you do it? I’m not supposed to get overheated. Doctor’s orders. Look, if you’re afraid, I’ll stay here. Here, here are my car keys. Go by yourself. Take the money with you.”

“I don’t drive.”

“What? You don’t drive? Don’t they have driver’s training in your high school? That’s very important.”

“I go to parochial school.”

“Oh. Oh, I see. Parochial school. The nuns. If I came with you I could tell you what to do. I could stand outside and tell you just what to do. It’s easy. They make it look like a cockpit but it’s easy. All I want is for you to start it and turn the air conditioning on High. It’s urgent that I get out of the heat. I’ve been in the hospital and the car has been standing. It’s like a blast furnace. If five dollars isn’t enough—”

“All right,” the boy said uncertainly.

Flesh accompanied him to the car, keeping up a nutty chatter. “Parochial school,” he said, “sure. Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish. Tradition. What are you so afraid? Parochial school. Broken-field running. You could be off like a shot if you wanted. What could
I
do? I’m sick. You could dodge. Fake me out. You’d go between the parked cars. What could a sick guy like me do? I couldn’t catch you in the Cadillac. Relax please. Who’s sick? Maybe I know him?”

“What do you mean?”

“I found you in the waiting room. You’re visiting somebody. Who?”

“My dad.”

“Oh, your dad. What’s his name? We’re fellow patients. Maybe I know him.”

“Richard Mullen? He had a heart attack.”

“Dick Mullen’s your pop? Dick Mullen?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, he’ll be fine. I heard the docs talking. He’s out of the woods.”

“You really heard that?”

“Oh, absolutely. Out of the woods. On the mend. His last two cardiograms have been very exciting. They’ve definitely stabilized. He mustn’t let you see you’re worried. I mean, you mustn’t let him see you’re worried. Who’s your patron saint? Pray to your patron saint for a cheerful countenance. Pop’s going to be terrific.”

The kid began to cry.

“What’s this? What’s this? What kind of a patron saint are we talking about here? Some deafo?” Flesh looked into the sky. “That’s
cheer
ful countenance, not
tear
ful!” He smiled and the boy laughed. They were at the car, Ben standing behind the boy at the driver’s side, feeling the terrific heat.

“Get in,” he said. The boy hesitated. “What, you think I’m the witch in Hansel and Gretel? You think I could fake
you
out? A broken-field runner from parochial school? Get in, get in.” He handed the boy the keys and told him what to do and, once the engine had started, how to work the air conditioning. He had the boy close all the doors. “Let me know when it’s cool,” he said. “Rap on the window with your knuckles.” In a few minutes the boy came out of the car. They changed places. Ben lowered the window and tried to give him the five dollars, but the boy shook his head. “Take it, go on, don’t be crazy. Take it, you saved my life.”

“Really,” the boy said, “it’s all right.”

“The laborer is worth his hire. Take the money. Buy yourself some Mister Softees.”

“No. Please. Really. I don’t want the money.”

“What, listen, is this a religious thing? Is this something to do with parochial school?”

“What you told me about my father,” the boy said. “What you heard from the doctors about his improvement. That’s all the payment I, you know, need. Thank you.”

Flesh was thinking about his health, the prognosis, the things he’d read since Wolfe had first explained the meaning of his blindness. He was thinking of what one day he could expect to feel in his face, flies walking lightly in place of his cheeks, the heavy sensation of sand between his toes and in his socks even when he was barefoot, of weakness in his limbs, of hunks of deadened flesh along his thighs and torso like queer grafted absences against which the inside of his arms would brush as they might brush against rubber or wood, sensations he could not imagine now, feelings under his thumbnails, the ridges of his cock, things in his pores, stuff in his lip, thinking of the infinite symptoms of the multiple sclerotic.

“Yeah,” he said. “I understand. You’re a good boy. Tell Mother. She probably needs cheering up, too.” And he put the car in gear and drove against the fantastic record heat wave, looking for a hole in it as pioneers traveling west might once have looked for passes through the mountains, as explorers had paddled and portaged to seek a northwest passage. He used side roads and Interstates, paved and unpaved secondary state roads and county, bypasses and alternates, limited-access divided highways and principal thruways, feeling chased by brownouts and power-failed space, civilization’s demyelination, slipping safely into temporary zones of remission and waiting in these in motels until the symptoms of the heat wave caught up with him again and the electricity sputtered and was snuffed out like a candle and the air conditioning died.

He gassed up wherever he could. The pumps would not work where the electricity failed, and whenever he came to one of those zones of remission—the heat, constant everywhere, did not in itself insure a brownout; rather the land and towns, invisibly networked with mad zigzag jigsaw power grids, grids like a crossword, secret-coded with electrical messages he couldn’t break (in a single block the power might be off in five adjacent buildings but on in the sixth and seventh and off again in an eighth and ninth), had been mysteriously parceled; agreements had been made, contingency plans had gone into effect, Peter robbed here to pay Paul, there permitted to hold his own, a queer but absolute and even visible (the lights, the lights) negotiation and exchange like the complicated maneuvers of foreign currency, the towns seeming to have grown wills, a capacity to conspire, to give and to take; he had an impression of thrown switches, jammed buttons, broken locks—he first sought out service stations, accepting Regular if there was no Premium, refreshing his oil even if it was down by less than a cup, filling everything: his radiator, his battery, even the container that held the water that sprayed his windshield, to the brim, the brim. Only then did he seek a motel. And, registered, walked to a hardware store, not wanting to use any of his precious gasoline in the wasteful stop-and-start of town driving. In the hardware store he would purchase five-gallon cans and carry them back empty to the gas station closest to his motel to have them filled. These he would store in his trunk, moving his grips and garment bags onto the backseat of his car. (At one time he had as much as sixty gallons in gas cans.) And flashlights, too. And batteries. Bandoliers of batteries, quivers of them, an ordnance of Eveready. And in bookstores atlases, guidebooks of the region to supplement the service-station maps, the Texaco and Shell and Mobil and Phillips 66 South Dakotas and Nebraskas and Kansases and Colorados he already had. Finally to return to the motel, not yet undressing even, pulling a chair up to the television and switching from channel to channel—these were hick towns, the sticks, on cable TV, near the eastern edges of mountain time, the western edges of central—to catch the weather reports. (He bought a portable radio which he took with him into the motels to listen to the forecasts on the local radio station.) Becoming in that frantic week and a fraction since he had left Rapid City behind him, the stench of his spoiled, dissolved flavors in his nostrils—he’d stopped to see Zifkovic first, with him investigated the extent of the damage, the high-water mark of the melted Mister Softees, the smashed artificial strawberry and broken chocolate, the ruined crushed banana and pineapple and decomposed orange, the filmy vanilla and the serums of lime and lemon, all the scum of melted fruit, oils now, wet paint—a savant of conditions, an anchorman of drought and heat, a seer almost, second-guessing the brownouts, seeing them coming, a quick study of the peak hours, and not wanting to be caught in the motel room when the town stalled, dreading that, forgetting even his symptoms in his incredible concentration and prophecy. Hitting at last on tricks, calling the local power stations and electric companies, on ruses getting through to the executives themselves, calling long distance to Omaha even, misrepresenting himself. (The Mister Softee experience in South Dakota had taught him what to say: “Mr. Rains, Herb Castiglia here. I’m Innkeeper at the Scotts Bluff Ramada and I’ve got this problem, sir. I’ve got an opportunity to buy a ton of ice. Now the son of a bitch who’s pushing it wants forty cents a pound for the stuff. That’s a cockeyed price and for my dough the guy’s no better than a looter. He won’t sell less than a ton, and at forty cents a pound that comes to eight hundred bucks. I’m over a barrel, Mr. Rains, but I’ve got two or three thousand dollars tied up in my meats for my restaurant. What I need to know is if there’s going to be a brownout, and, if so, how long you expect it to last. If she blows I’m okay for six to eight hours, but in this heat any longer than that and the stuff will turn into silage. What do I do, Mr. Rains? I got to cover myself. Can you give me a definitive no or a definite yes?”) And striking responsive chords in Mr. Rains, in Mr. DeVilbiss, in Mr. Schopf, small businessman to big, getting at last the inside information he could not get on the half dozen or so channels available to him on the cable TV, or the local country-music and farm-report radio stations. And acting on these advices, skipping town, hitting the road. Driving after dark on the hotter days, the hundred-plus scorchers—to cut down on the air conditioning, to keep it on Low instead of High as he’d have to do in the daytime, conserving his gas, four days and he hadn’t had to tap the reserves in his trunk—and looking over the broad plains for the lights of a town, any town, a prospector of the electric.