The Franchiser (30 page)

“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!”

“Who, me? No no, not even a keen observer most of the time. It’s only the juices of remission give me my power today. But that’s not in it. I want to make you an offer, I want to give you a job.”

“God’s nostrils, what would I do for references?”

“Did I ask for references? Did I say anything about references? What do you think, life is a term paper? I want
you
, not your references. I’m opening this Travel Inn in a bit, and I could use a good reliable man to run it. I’ll pay you fifteen thousand a year and you can take your meals in the restaurant and have a double that opens out onto the swimming pool.”

But in the end it was the convict who wanted Flesh’s references, the convict who was frightened off by Flesh’s own blank-check talk. By that and some quality he must have detected in him that was out of whack with his own notion of what was fitting. He made a speech, still uninflated and controlled. “Reality wants us,” the convict said. “What you offer me is very kind, what with your suspicions of me and all, and as to those I’ll say you aye or nay, neither one, for what I did if I did something and who I am if I am someone is none of your business. God’s gym shoes, sir, it isn’t that sort of world that you should get carried away, and even this, what’s happening right now, I mean me riding in this grand automobile, why that, too, is a sin against reality. I asked for the ride and you give it,
gave
it—I’m correcting myself because I know better and bad grammar is another sin against reality—and so that part’s my fault and I’ll have to watch myself and make my amends some way or other, but the point is that we come into this world and sooner or later an obligation is created and we have to be real. Real with each other and real with ourselves.”

“I’m real,” Flesh said.

“Maybe, maybe not. That’s not my business or for me to say. From what I understand, you got this sickness and now it’s given you some kind of breathing spell.—Well, sickness is real enough in its way, I guess, but it isn’t as real as health, and if I was you and I got the breathing spell you got—”

“You’ve your own breathing spell, Mister Convict.”

“—the breathing spell you’ve got, I wouldn’t go around crowing about how wonderful it all is.”

“No?”

“No, sir. I’d find my reality.”

“Who are you to talk, with your vintage luggage and your twenty-year-old suit?”

“That suitcase is what a suitcase is supposed to look like, and the suit is what men of my time wore. I’m not talking about clothes anyway. Why you traveling highways? Where you off to? Where you been? You got a wife? You got a son or sweet daughter at the University of Michigan?”

“Is that reality?”

“God’s glands, it is. You know what I’m hoping?” Flesh didn’t answer. “You know what I’m hoping? I’m hoping you got sample cases in the trunk of your car, yes, and casters on their bottoms to grease your gravity and road maps and Triptiks in the glove compartment and receipts from the oil companies because once you thought you might want to check your mileage, how much oil you burn. I hope you know to fire a sheet of newspaper and hold it up to warm the chimney so the fire draws. That your dampers are open in their season to be open and closed in their season to be closed.”

“I have plenty of road maps.”

“That you live in the middle of the middle class the bull’s-eye life. And that restaurants are for special occasions, birthdays, anniversaries, and once or twice a year just for the hell of it because you’re feeling good, because your ship came in or your uncle from California. I hope you have an insurance broker named Harry who sends you to a doctor who jiggles the results, systolic and diastolic, a dozen points up or down like a difficult window, and that your stocks aggravate you, that hindsight or foresight could have made you a rich man.”

“I
am
a rich man.”

“It ain’t the same. I wish you honorable lusts and one or two close calls with one of your wife’s bridge pals or a buyer, perhaps, when you’re both a little tight. And guilt like a whopping down payment you can’t manage so you draw back at the last minute and jerk off on the toilet seat that night like everybody else. I wish you the hypochondriacal concerns. May you find a lump you can’t figure at three o’clock in the morning and may a cough make you suspicious. Examine your stools like a stamp collector for two weeks running and give to a charity when it all blows over. Take an interest in the Super Bowl. Think about lamps, a davenport, finishing the basement, and settle for reupholstering what you’ve already got.”

“Reupholstering.”

“But spring for new carpeting every ten years. Talk arithmetic to yourself when you do your bills. Go on a diet and stick to it. Jog for a while and give it up. Cut down on smoking,
really
cut down. And may you have a nightmare you don’t understand or a dream that makes you cry and hear two jokes that crack you up but aren’t so funny when you tell them.”

“It sounds very exciting.”

“God’s rec room, who said anything about exciting? Exciting you already got. I’m talking about real, I’m talking about normal and the law of averages.”

“The law of averages,” Flesh said.

“All right, the Ten Commandments then. You can let me off up ahead.” They were still about seventy miles from Oklahoma City.

“There’s nothing up ahead.”

“That’s all right. That’s where I’m going. Thanks for the ride. Anywhere’s fine.”

Was he going to try something?

“God’s germs, man, stop the car, will you?”

Flesh took his foot off the accelerator to slow the car while he thought.

“God’s buttons, get a reality. I’m not going to hit you over the head.” He showed his hands. “Empty, see? You ain’t going to be cut. Just let me out, all right?”

Ben pulled over to the side and waited nervously while the fellow removed his suitcase from the back. He closed Ben’s doors and Flesh watched him carefully, expecting, once he realized he was safe, the man to cross to the other side of the highway. Instead, the convict simply moved a few feet down the road and put his thumb up. Flesh, annoyed, shifted to neutral and nudged the car in his direction, alternately depressing the power brake and releasing it, so that Ben, inside the big automobile, had the impression the Cadillac was actually limping up to the man.

“Hey,” Ben said, pressing open the electric window next to which his rider had been sitting. “You’re ruining my remission, do you know that?”

Their conversation was conducted with the fellow’s thumb still raised. It was, Ben Flesh suddenly realized—who had seen tens of thousands of hitchhikers in his day, his Flying Dutchman life bringing him up to, abreast, and beyond them (when, as most times, he chose not to stop)—the oddest gesture of petition there could be—a rakish prayer, more shrug than request, indifference in it, democracy. “Three years of suffering and you’re ruining my remission.”

“Get a reality,” the man said, only the corner of his mouth on Ben, his eyes on the road for cars. Ben watched him.

“Another shot in the dark—no offense—you’ll never get a ride with my car sitting here. You spoke of references. Surely to anybody passing by it must look as if I’ve just dumped you, given you bad references hitchhikerwise.”

“God’s rash, fellow, give over. Leave me be. All right, I made a mistake going with you. Well, I’ve served my time. Spring me, we’re square.”

“Let me just steal—no offense—a minute of your time—no offense.”

“Well then?”

“What’s wrong? Why do I put you off so? We’re perfect strangers.”

“We ain’t strangers,” the man said.

“I never saw you till this morning.”

“We’re not strangers. I been shut up with fellows like you decades. Crook, all crimes are crimes of passion. Adventure lays in the bloodstream like platelets. We’re not strangers. Get a normality. Live on the plains. Take a warm milk at bedtime. Be bored and find happiness. Grays and muds are the decorator colors of the good life. Don’t you know anything? Speed kills and there’s cholesterol in excitement. Cool it, cool it. The ordinary is all we can handle. Now beat it. Goodbye.”

“Listen—”

“God’s unlisted number, God’s toenails and appetizers! I told you, mister, get out of my way.” Flesh raised the electric window and drove off.

A few miles down the road he spotted another hitchhiker. His heart was still pounding from what the convict had said and he felt under some compulsion to stop for this new stranger, a fellow—he’d slowed to study him while he was still a couple of hundred feet away from the man—in his late twenties, Ben judged, without parcels or luggage and dressed not for the road—a mile or so back Ben had spotted an abandoned late-model Pinto on the shoulder of the highway, its doors closed and hood raised—but like a man with car trouble.

“Get in,” he said. “Run out of gas?”

“Yes,” the young man said, “or something with the engine. The last sign I saw said there are service stations at the next exit. I figure that would still be about ten miles or so up ahead.”

“I’ll take you.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”

“No trouble,” Ben said.

And then the nice young man in the good clothes—it was closer to twenty miles than to ten—began to address Ben in public-service announcements.

“Only you can prevent forest fires,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I was just thinking,” the young man said, “only you can prevent forest fires.”

“Me?”

“Well. You and me. You know—us.”

“Uh huh.”

“Another thing. We should keep the drunk driver off the highway.”

“Yes,” Ben said.

“And hire the handicapped.”

Ben nodded and pressed down on the accelerator.

“More accidents occur in the home than anywhere else.”

“Yes, I heard that.”

He took a tube of Rolaids out of his pocket and extended it toward Ben.

“No thanks.”

“No?” The young man took one from the roll and put it into his mouth. “I keep this and all medicines out of the reach of children,” he said, chewing.

“That’s good,” Ben said. He drove even faster.

“Unh unh,” the young man said. “Slow down and live.”

It was odd. It was what the other one had been trying to tell him, too.

“Yep, discrimination in housing is not only wrong, it’s illegal. Save the children,” the man said. “Get your pap test, and remember,” he said, “if you’re an alien you have to register your address by January 16. Forms are available in any post office.”

When Ben reached the exit he took him to the first service station.

Sure, he thought, back on the highway, the manageable ordinary, yes. And where was it to be found?

Under the unicorn fast asleep.

He had said big deal his remission was back, big deal he could shuffle a deck of cards, but in his motel room in Oklahoma City he used and savored his suddenly recovered powers.

He trawled his right hand over the brocade spread, digging his fingers pleasantly into its rough plains, bristled as underbrush or stubble. He knew that his nerves were lying to him, that his brain had scrambled his sense of touch, that his fingertips moved over only temporarily coded textures, but there was a lump in his throat, and he was happy. This was the only reality he needed, had ever needed, to receive sensation in its more pleasant disguises, quenching after three years his nerves’ long thirst for the smooth, the soft. Happy is he, he thought, for whom gunny is as silk, burlap as cashmere, wool as percale, instead of—his experience of the past years—the other way around. He would have browsed textbooks of textiles like large tomes of wallpaper samples, would willingly have caressed all dry goods, all bolts, rolls, lengths, and swatches. He wanted jute between his fingers, sackcloth, linen, cambric, mohair. He longed to touch toweling, vicuna, worsted and jersey, tweed, homespun, duffel and mull. Serge, he thought, flannel. Muslin and calico. Chintz. He would have set his fingertips against the grain of sharkskin and dimity, gingham and voile, handled poplin and madras, satin and taffeta, the chiffons and the velvets. Corduroy, tulle, organdy, lace. Grosgrain, chenille. He was a sucker for seersucker, would have felt felt.

Oh oh, he thought, son of his tailor pop and godson of many-costumed Finsberg, how queer a fit my punishment has been. How unsuitable. How wickedly fate has taken my measure. For three years and more, health’s yokel, its clock-sock boob, fetching stares from the natives, those fashion plates, all the customized robust. Men and women with muscle tone, good color, sound tactile good sense, their protein levels in the Swiss banks of being. What I have missed! How deprived! And of all the fabrics the one most missed was woman’s, and next to that, perhaps even before it, the natural feel of his own now middle-aged skin.

He took himself in hand. Entered the shower. (He would not use soap, had no need for the protective glaze of lather.) Adjusted the temperature of the water with the thermostat of his body, his skin like a good thermometer, registering for the first time in years hot as hot, cold as cold, lukewarm as ecstasy. And focused the showerhead like a portrait photographer, shooting with needlepoint, fine spray, the splat of raindrop and heavy weathers of cloudburst. His body calling a spade a spade, even with his eyes closed discriminating, calling out the f-stops of velocity and feeling, feeling—God, had
that
gone too? had
that
abandoned him?—a strange sensation now, something new under the sun, no, something rerecognized—feeling
wetness
, distinguishing dampness, all the marvelous degrees from dry to soaked, the splendid spectrum of humidity.

And when he left the shower stall—he had no need for the traction of bathmats, his balance, which had been slipping away now for months, had returned—he dived into the thick motel bath towels no longer rough to his skin as sandpaper or ground glass or cat-o’-nine-tails. He rubbed himself down, however, with a pulled-punch vigor, making the stinging noises of hygiene—bah
rruh
, prrrt, shashashashasha—but holding back at last, fearful lest he accidentally press some raw nerve which would, like a linchpin tumbler falling into place in a lock, cause his brain to renege on his remission and return his body to its zipper condition. So he dried his scalp gently, even as he made his curious warpath movements, and ventriloquized the whoops and yaps of a remembered zealousness. And combed his hair wet.