Franklin
Fiction by Derrick Martin-Campbell
Alex spent the summer he turned 18 working at a tourist restaurant on the bay and living in his Aunt Betsy’s house, a bed and breakfast she ran out of a haunted old Victorian, standing alone on a hill facing the Pacific and the setting sun.
His customers at the restaurant were mostly motorcycle hobbyists and retired sport fishermen, middle-aged men and their wives and girlfriends, all sunburned red, squinting and eating and drinking and laughing, meeting all the world this way and loving it with the money they fanned upon it. And of course, loving Alex, since — at their command, dutifully and with reverence — he took it away.
“This is the bill …” began one such customer, slapping the ledger on the table, credit card protruding.
His party of 15, all variations to Alex on this middle-aged man and woman sitting beside him, the man in a sleeveless T-shirt and mirrored shades he wore indoors, ball cap backward on his hairless skull, the woman freckled and bleach-blond, disdainful in a bikini top. It was three in the afternoon and beer, scotch, and tequila glasses already covered the tables. From the sunglasses, Alex guessed the guy was probably already drunk when he came in.
“… This is for you …” he went on, placing a 50 on top of the ledger, “… and this …” raising a hundred steady in his other hand, “… this … is for the man … who follows her ass out to the parking lot … and takes … what’s … coming to him.”
Conversation at their tables stopped as the room’s attention suddenly reorganized around Alex. All watched him as the man pushed the money into a sloppy pile on the bill, topped it off with the cherry of his car keys, crossed his arms, and waited, staring at Alex.
Alex looked from the woman, to the money, to the man, to the crowd of hungry eyes tracking him. The woman only stared right back, Sphinx-like, watching him around the food she chewed. He saw how the man’s chest rose quick and shallow beneath his crossed arms, sweat on his temples. The couple sitting beside them smiled at Alex.
His own sweat cold on his back, Alex hesitated just a moment before he brushed the keys off onto the table, snapped up both the money and ledger, and, turning to go, managed to deadpan over his shoulder, “Thank you for the offer, sir, but I’m not sure your truck is big enough for the three of us.”
For a long time, just the silence followed him. Then, as he passed between the swinging kitchen doors, the room burst finally into loud, drunken, ecstatic laughter behind him. In the kitchen, he headed straight for the freezer, stuck his head in, and breathed deeply, blushing from the something strange and not altogether unpleasant still stirring in him.
His Aunt Betsy’s friends were the other side of the Humboldt County people. They were like Betsy, old hippies and beatniks, single people who drove the summer up and down the 101 in cars with more than 200,000 miles on them. They drank and smoked and played the piano and bragged of their decades-old exploits, reminiscing easily about a west coast before I-5, before California Route 1, even … or the Spanish Mission Trail. They claimed to recall impossible things, the Gold Rush and the Wiyot Massacre, priests knelt praying in the frothing waves, before there were palm trees.
“Okay, well, what was it like, then?” asked Alex, mostly joking with the white-haired woman beside him, a guest and old friend of Betsy’s, as they sat rolling spliffs on the porch one evening. “What was it like at the very beginning, way back before there was anybody here at all?”
“Anyone?” she said.
“Anyone. No people. Nobody. What was it like, then?”
She looked up from the work in her lap, out over the railing and into the purple, humid night. She licked a paper, thinking. “I guess …” she said, paused. “I guess it was …” Her eyes seemed to glimmer as she cocked her head, then to focus very far away. “Bigger,” she said, finally, “or maybe smaller?” She bit her lip.
“Come on,” teased Alex. “Wasn’t it better? Isn’t that what you people are all about? Like, ‘Well, back in the day …’” He smiled at her, waiting, but the white-haired woman remained still, ambiguous, immune to his prompts, and for a while then, there were only the crickets.
Finally, after long enough that he twitched a little at her touch, stirred from his own reverie, she gently patted his leg. “Oh. You’re such a flirt, aren’t you, sweetie. Come on, where’d that Betsy get to? We can’t smoke all this just us two.”
Franklin arrived the afternoon of July 4th, and Betsy ran down the gravel driveway to meet him, screeching like a teenager the whole way. He stood easily 7 feet tall, at least 500 pounds, wore a pitted white suit, drove a dirty white sedan, and was accompanied only by a filthy, half-wild, 16-year-old boy.
From the porch, Alex watched Franklin extract his body from the sedan like it was a magic trick, growing slowly into a colossus in the sunshine. He wrapped a bear’s paw around Betsy’s shoulders as she crashed into him and nuzzled her face in his belly, happy. Her arms did not reach halfway around him.
“Oh, my dear, sweet Betsy,” he said, pushed a handkerchief around his forehead. “It has been an age.”
A horse could have dozed in his shadow.
Alex helped the boy carry Franklin’s luggage, one slim suitcase and a crate of 16 bottles of wine, bottles Franklin uncorked and drank over the course of the evening between long, melancholy sighs. The boy said nothing all through dinner, ate nearly as much as Franklin, who consumed enough of Betsy’s spare ribs, cabbage, and scalloped potatoes to feed three people, ate it moaning and rolling his eyes, sausage fingers dancing in sorcerous arcs through the steaming, supper air.
“These potatoes,” he said, chewing. “Mm, Betsy, they are not potatoes,” and with his free hand, he blessed them. “They are the Body,” he said, mouth full. “Hand us the wine, love.”
There were no other guests that night, thankfully, since Franklin’s stentorian voice carried unbelievably through the house. Eating and drinking and then smoking and drinking afterward, Alex and the boy mostly listened as Franklin and Betsy told stories to and about each other, nights and boys they had shared, stories ending always prematurely in private, knowing laughter.
“Alex,” Franklin said at one point, turning to address him for the first time that evening, “that white car out there in the drive now, the sedan, do you know where I got it?”
The room’s attention turned to Alex. Though Franklin did not immediately continue, taking a satisfied moment to recross his legs, Alex sensed the question was rhetorical and waited politely from his cushion on the floor. He rested his chin on his knees, offered Franklin the same smile he offered customers at the restaurant preparing to give their orders.
“Did you know, Alex, that I did not, in fact, buy that car outside, but that I, more accurately, acquired it? And from your Aunt Betsy, even?” He winked at Betsy who covered her giggle with her hand. She laughed that night as Alex had never heard her laugh before.
Franklin paused again to remove his white loafers (18 inches each) and set them beside the couch on which he lounged. They rested neatly beside the several bottles he’d finished just since sitting down.
“Really?” Alex said, when he felt it was appropriate.
“Why, yes!” said Franklin, very pleased. “You see, Alex, there was a time in my life when, as a young man, I saw the fruits of this world hung a good deal heavier above me than I do now, heavier and closer to the ground, you see? And, seeing them thus, I was often moved to avail myself upon these fruits. Because, you see, Alex, it is my firm belief that the things we need most in this world are never offered to us; they are, in fact, only taken. It is something I attempt to imprint on all of the young people I encounter, that they might comprehend and benefit from this lone, true imperative offered us by this cruel world: Take. Take, Alex. Take, take, and take again. Always. It is this imperative I, myself, obeyed when, returning to the matter at hand, at 23, I took your Aunt Betsy’s car one hot August day, drove it kicking dust and gravel as she chased me screaming down the drive, barefoot in her underwear, vengeful as an orphan — ”
“And shooting at you — don’t forget!” said Betsy, laughing. “Oh, my goodness, Franklin, do you remember? I shot at you. At least once, I’m sure.”
“Yes!” he said, choking on his wine as he laughed, as well. “Yes, good God! Of course! Who gave you a gun? Which one of your Neanderthals?”
Together they laughed awhile, then. The boy watched. Alex watched, too, still smiling. He waited until the room completely stilled. And then.
“What kind of gun was it?” Alex said.
Suddenly, the air in the room changed, the easy mirth of the previous conversation drained away.
“What did you say?” Franklin asked, speaking quietly at first. He looked to Alex, then Betsy, coughed some more, searched the room in swelling indignation before grimacing in disgust. “Did you hear him, Betsy? What — What kind of gun was it?”
“Aw, Franklin, come on,” she said. “It’s okay. It’s just a question. He didn’t mean anything by it. Hey, let’s have some more wine.”
But Alex did not stop smiling at him, and Franklin, seeing this, refused all trifles. The couch groaned beneath Franklin as he rolled away, pulled his stocking-feet protectively beneath his bulk. Betsy petitioned him, but he only muttered and sniffed the air.
“Such an amusing young person, isn’t he?” he said, saying it several times to all corners of the room.
Glowing amidst the discord, Alex still wasn’t sure exactly what he’d done, or why, and he, too, began to cast about the room, grinning stoned and drunk, until his gaze met finally that of the boy, Franklin’s boy, his own gaze red-eyed and already smiling right back at Alex.
Later, lingering in the bathroom, Alex took a quiet moment, grateful to be alone. He splashed water on his face, heard the sound of Franklin’s voice downstairs. He watched his own eyes in the mirror, waited until a stranger looked back.
“It was his tone, Betsy! The tone he used to address me!”
Returning from a similar trip still later that night, Alex found Franklin alone and snoring on the couch in the now otherwise-empty room. Through the screen door, he heard what sounded like Betsy’s whispered voice out on the porch, heard her beg, whispering, “… Oh, no … no, no, please,” heard her laugh (a huskier version of the new laugh he’d noticed that night), followed by silence, then more begging. “No, please …” she said. “I can’t. Please.” Then, gently, little more than a sigh, “Please.”
Relieved of his hosting duties, Alex turned to remount the stairs and head for bed when, just then, a new noise halted him. It started low, nearly imperceptible at first, but Alex felt a shiver run down his spine upon hearing it, felt time seem to slow as the sound of it gradually filled the room until, finally, it became a word.
“You,” Franklin said.
Alex turned around. Though he remained seated, he saw Franklin’s body stir, saw his chest swell with new breath as he slowly stretched and set his shoulders, even swore he felt the house noticeably tremble as, one by one, reverberating with each impact, Franklin, groaning, set his giant’s stocking-feet upon the ground.
“You!” he repeated, louder now, eyes still shut as though dreaming or just very drunk. “Can’t you see,” he said, “how, for all your varied … mmm … charms, … at the end of the day … you’re all just exactly the same: a pack of smug … fucking … sluts. You are!” he roared, making Alex jump. “You are, and you don’t even realize it … how ordinary you are … mmm … even as you are treated so exceptionally … humored by every john on the fucking block! But it isn’t always going to be that way, my friend. … Oh, no, it isn’t … mmm. … Oh, no … it … isn’t.”
And then he was still again.
Alex did not move right away. Dizzy and frightened — his own blood pounding in his ears the only audible sound left in the country quiet — his hand found the banister behind him as he turned into what should have been his first step up the stairs. Afraid to turn his back on Franklin, though, he misjudged and tripped, landed hard on his side, and knocked the wind from his lungs. Lying there, gasping for air as in a dream, Alex watched as Franklin’s dark, mysterious shape rose from the couch, like a bear to its hind legs, saw Franklin grow huge before him, filling the room, disturbing the chandelier, and cracking the ceiling plaster. And it seemed there was for that moment nowhere beyond his grasp, nowhere where Franklin’s great hands could not fall upon him.
“Love will leave you!” Franklin cried, as Alex found his feet enough to scramble up the stairs on all fours, Franklin’s voice still pursuing him. “Love will leave you! It will! It will! It will!”
Upstairs, Alex locked his door and fell against it, tried to slow his breathing, and listened for any sign of pursuit. He felt the house creak and tremble beneath him, straddling fault lines. He pressed his ear to the door, listening. Then, to the floor.
In the morning, Alex found Betsy hungover and drinking coffee at the kitchen table. She held her head in her small, fluted fingers, peered wincing out between them at the world.
Franklin and the boy were already gone, she said, the boy just some street kid, someone Franklin had picked up in Golden Gate Park a few days before. She told Alex how Franklin had apparently told the boy he was dying, had invited him to drive to Vancouver with him, where they would get married, and Franklin would leave the boy all his money.
“All his money?” Alex said.
“Yeah.” Betsy snorted bitterly.
“How old was he, even? That kid?”
“Oh, don’t worry. He was old enough.”
Standing at the counter behind her, Alex poured coffee for himself. Stirring it, he watched Betsy hold her head in her hands, watched the thin, fragile line of her spine, shoulder blades obvious through her robe. He watched her throughout the day, the week, gardening, cooking, doing the books; he waited to feel something, disdain maybe, or pity. He watched her sit and drink her coffee, and he waited.
He waited all summer.
