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Authors: Stanley Elkin

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BOOK: The Franchiser
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They spent part of their last day together at the Broadmoor with Patty analyzing the handwriting in the logos of some of Ben’s franchises. They found their samples in the advertisements of the Colorado Springs Yellow Pages. She told him that the Fin the “Fred Astaire Dance Studios” was very interesting.

“See,” she said, “how at the lowest point of the downstroke there begin to be right and left tending upward spirals. The
F
is practically a caduceus. God, Ben, it
is
a caduceus. In classical mythology this was the staff carried by Mercury. Mercury the messenger, fleet and nimble-footed in the sky. What
is
dance if not the defiance of gravity? Oh, I say, Ben, see the
A
, the hiatus at the top of the oval, the long
l
loop that doesn’t touch the base line. These are ‘irresistible eyes.’ This writer exerts a compelling influence on people. He wins their affection and confidence.”

“That’s Fred.”

Dairy Queen wasn’t in cursive, or Radio Shack, or Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken or Econo-Car, or most of the other of his franchises that had branches in Colorado Springs. But he’d had a Ford dealership once and Patty had a lot to say about the
r
in Ford, though it was poorly printed and didn’t show up clearly on the page.

He asked her to analyze Holiday Inn, said it might be useful to know about the competition when he opened his Travel Inn.

“When one leg of the
H
has a firm downstroke and the other is generally the same length but has a generously deflated concave loop, these are ‘horns,’ and the writer can become very obstinate and will almost always insist on his own way of doing things regardless of opposition or consequences. See how the
H
is crossed? Graphologists call this ‘airplane wings’ and think it indicates a tendency to press people for information which will be of advantage to the writer. When the wings cross both downstrokes, these are ‘riding crops one upon the other’ and the writer—”

“Do you believe this crap?”

“I get many prospectuses from corporations offering their stocks,” she said. “The numbers mean nothing to me. I’ve a head for figures but figures change. I look only at the signatures of the corporation’s officers. I am a rich woman.”

Ben nodded and they went to bed together one last time. It was, from Ben’s point of view and almost certainly from hers, the most satisfactory screwing they had yet done. As usual, at climax, the insights came pouring out of her, a mile a minute and on every subject under the sun. Ben tried to follow, for she was very interesting and made a lot of sense, but his own groans and whimpers interfered, blocking out much of what she had to say, until all that he could hear at last were his own cries of pleasure, the baritones of his fulfillment and tenors of his dude ecstasy and, listening to these, to his own forceful shouts of completion and triumph, it was as if he tried to distinguish between speakers on two contending frequencies on the radio—they were now
truly
in nature—and as he concentrated, squeezing all meaning from Patty’s lucid, fastidious orgasm, the better to hear his own barks and cackles and yaps of relish, he heard his noises coalesce, thicken into speech, the vowels and consonants of violence contained, intelligently rearranging themselves into an order and form that may have been there from the beginning.


I
,” he roared—from “ahh”—“want,” he demanded—from “oh,” “nh”—“my remission”—from “mnmnh,” from “shhh”—“
back!
” From shudders caught in his throat like chicken bones. “I want my remission back,” he said quietly.

He rolled off her and onto his back, his penis wetting her thigh, marking it with its contact and scent as animals mark other animals.

They turned on their sides away from each other, joined curiously at the ass, making an
X
. These were “railroad crossings” and the writer wants his remission back.

“Yes?” the Insight Lady said. “You want your remission back? Yes? Ben, you know ever since you first told me that, I’ve wanted to say certain things to you. I think I have an insight that might help you. It seems to me, Ben, with all this talk of remission, that you want to live like a man with his bladder empty, to travel light and even weaponless, but be protected anyway. It’s interesting, for example, that you have always had all that power equipment in your automobiles. Power steering, and power brakes, Ben, power windows. A power aerial that rises from a hole in the front fender. Oh yes,” she said, “you want to live even emptier-handed than the rest of us.”

“My hand?” he shouted angrily. “My
hand? Graphologist!
What
about
my hand? Did you ever once analyze
that?
” he yelled. “What the fuck do you think it would show?” he screamed. “
The sand, the fucking sand!
It’s a Sahara. Riffs ride their horses in it and shoot at the Foreign Legion. It’s a sandbox. Kids piss in it and make mud pies. My hand? This? The writer is in agony and only wishes, only
prays
he were fucking
contagious!
” he cried. “Silly bitchbody with your jerk-off insights and your pukey mind!” he thundered at her.

Patty turned to him. She touched his shoulder, pulling on it, turning him toward her. She leaned forward and kissed him sweetly on the lips and smiled.

“Oh, Ben,” she said, “it’s been a wonderful week. You’re a good listener,” she told him. “I wish my husband were. Well. I guess I’d better get dressed now. It’s only two hours till my plane. I love you, sweetheart. I love you, Ben.”

For of course she hadn’t heard him, hadn’t heard even the least of his loud noises.

“…a disgrace,” the guy from Fort Worth said. “Fun is fun and boys will be boys and it’s all very well to live it up at a convention, but to come in drunk and disrupt a meeting like that, the full plenary session with a new line on the line, that is quite another story altogether and really it would be best for everyone concerned, best for Mr. Flesh, best for the people in the Bowling Green area, best, frankly, for Radio Shack, if Flesh would just quietly relinquish his franchise, sell it back to the mother corporation, which would of course buy back his stock as well, all at a reasonable price. We assure you, sir, that you will not lose by the transaction. If anything, it’s Radio Shack which will suffer the most immediate financial setback. So, while we cannot force you, while we cannot—”

“How much?”

“What?”

“How much? What’s your best offer?”

“Well, we’d have to send someone down there to take an inventory. We’d have to have an audit. We’d want to—”

“Sold.”

“Well, I don’t know what to say. I hadn’t thought you’d be so—”

“On one condition.”

“Condition? Now look here, mister, you don’t have to sell to us, but we don’t have to sell to you either. We can cut off your purchasing privileges, you’d have to find some other supplier. So don’t you start waving any ‘on one condition’s’ around.”

“That if he wants it you’ve got to resell the franchise to Ned Tubman of Erlanger, Kentucky.”

“There’s a franchise in Erlanger. Isn’t Tubman…”

“Tubman, yes. He owns the Radio Shack in Erlanger.”

“Why would you care…Listen, if you’re thinking of making some sort of dummy corporation, selling to us and using Tubman as a front…”

“Tubman, yes. Tubman must have first refusal. I’m not in it. Tubman has always wanted to see Bowling Green, Kentucky.”

“He wants to see Bowling Green, Kentucky?”

“Like other people want to see Paris or the Great Wall of China.”

“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.”

4

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.

BOOK: The Franchiser
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