The last alterations I made in our business strategies were, first, to change the name of the place from Bemish’s Birch Beer Depot (too big a mouthful) to Franks, no apostrophe (I liked the pun plus the straightforward appeal). And on top of that I declared that only two things would a human being buy when he pulled off the road at our sign: a frosty mug of root beer and a hell of a good Polish wurst-dog of the sort everyone always dreams about and wishes they could find while driving through some semi-scenic backwater with a hunger on. Karl Bemish, a saved man now in his white, monogrammed tunic, paper cap and shiny dome, was of course promptly established as owner-operator, yukking it up with his old customers, making crude, half-assed jokes about the “bun man” and generally feeling like he’d gotten his life back on track since the much-too-early death of his precious wife. And for me, for whom it was all pretty simple and amusing, our transaction was more or less what I’d been searching for when I came back from France but didn’t find: a chance to help another, do a good deed well and diversify in a way that would pay dividends (as it’s begun to) without driving myself crazy. We should all be so lucky.
I emerge out of the woodsy Haddam back roads to the intersection with 31, over which a state utility crew with a cherry picker is just suspending the prophesied new stoplight, the crew members standing around in white hard hats and work clothes, watching the procedure as if it were an act of legerdemain. A temporary sign says “Your highway taxes at work— SLOW.” A few cars are pulling cautiously around, then heading off south toward Trenton.
Franks, with its new brown and orange mug-with-frothy-bubbles sign, sits kitty-cornered from the yellow highway truck. A lone customer car sits off to one side on the newly re-asphalted lot, its driver cool behind tinted windows. Karl’s old red VW Beetle is parked by the back door, the red OPEN card in the window. And as I park I admit I unreservedly admire all, including the silver kitchen-on-wheels converted now into a dogs-on-wheels, glistening in the corner of the lot, all polished up by Everick and Wardell and ready to be hauled into Haddam early Monday. Some quality of its single-use efficiency, its compactness and portability, make it seem like the best purchase I’ve ever made, including even my house, though of course I have scarcely any use for it and should probably sell it before it depreciates out of existence.
Karl and I have forged an unwritten agreement that at least once a week I drive out and troop the colors, a practice I enjoy and especially today after my disconcerting wire-crossings with the Markhams and Betty McLeod — neither one typical of my days, which are almost always pleasant. Karl, during our first year together, which included the market sinkhole last fall (we coasted through unfazed), has begun treating me like a spirited but slightly too headstrong young maverick boss and has reinvented himself as an eccentric but faithful lifelong employee whose job it is to snipe at me in a salty, Walter Brennanish way, thereby keeping me on a true compass course. (He is much happier being an employee than running the show, which I’m sure comes from years in the ergonomics industry; though I have never thought of myself as anyone’s boss, since at times I feel I’m hardly my own.)
When I step inside the “Employees only” side door, Karl is behind the sliding window, reading the Trenton Times, perched on two stacked red plastic milk cartons from the days when he made malts. It is hot as a broiler back here, and Karl has a little rubber-bladed Hammacher Schlemmer fan trained on his face. As usual, everything is spotless, since Karl has dark worries of getting what he calls a “C card” from the county health officer and so spends hours every night scouring and polishing, mopping and rinsing, until you could sit right down on the concrete and eat a four-course meal and never give one thought to salmonella.
“I’ll tell you, I’m getting goddamn anxious about my economic future now, aren’t you?” he says in a loud, scoffing voice. Karl has on his plastic reading specs and hasn’t otherwise remarked my arrival. He’s dressed in his summer issue: short-sleeved white tunic, laundry-supplied black-and-white checkered knee shorts that let his thick, mealy, sausage-veined calves “breathe,” short black nylon socks and black crepe-soled brogans. An ancient transistor, tuned to the all-polka station in Wilkes-Barre, is playing “There Is No Beer in Heaven” at a low volume.
“I’m just interested in the Democrats to see how they’ll fuck up next,” I say, as though we’d been talking for hours, walking back to open the rear door onto the brookside picnic area to get some breeze going. (Karl is a lifelong Democrat who began voting Republican in the last decade but still thinks of himself as a nonconforming Jacksonian. To me, these are the true turncoats, though Karl in most ways is not a bad citizen.)
Since I have no special mission here today, I begin counting packages of hot dog buns, cans of condiments (spice relish, mustard, mayo, ketchup, diced onions), checking the meat delivery and the extra kegs of root beer I’ve ordered for the “Firecracker Weenie Firecracker” concession.
“Looks like housing starts fell way off last month again, twelve point two from May. The dumb fucks. It’s gotta mean trouble to the realty business, right?” Karl gives the Times a good snapping as though to get the words lined up straighter. It pleases him for us to talk in this quasi-familial way (he is finally an old nostalgian where I’m concerned), as if we had come a long ways together and learned the same hard human lessons of decency and need. He peers at me over the newspaper, removes his half glasses, then stands and looks out the window as the car that’s been parked by the picnic tables idles out onto Route 31 and slowly starts north toward Ringoes. The backup bell on the highway department truck starts dinging away and a heavy, black man’s voice sings out, “Come-awn-back, nah, come-awn-back.”
“Units sold is down five from a year ago, though.” I say, while I estimate packages of Polish weenies in the cold box, frigid air hitting my face like a bright light. “Maybe it means people are going to buy houses already built. That’s my guess.” In fact that is what’ll happen, and the sorry-ass Markhams better be getting in touch with me and their brains toute de suite.
“Dukakis takes credit for the big Massachusetts Miracle, it’s only right he takes it for the big Taxachusetts Fuck-up. I’m glad I live in Joisey now.” Karl says this listlessly, still mooning out the window at the newly lined lot.
“Well.” I turn back toward him, ready to quote him my “Buyer vs. Seller” column eye-to-eye, but I confront his big checkered behind and two pale, meaty legs underneath. The rest of him is geezering around, watching the workers and their cherry picker and the new stoplight going up.
“And hot dogs,” Karl observes, having heard me say something I haven’t said, his voice faint for most of it being directed into the hot day, and making it easier for me to hear the polka music, which is pleasing. I am as ever always pleased to be here. “I don’t think anybody gives a shit about this election anyway,” Karl says, still facing out. “It’s just like the fuckin’ all-star game. Big buildup, then nothin’.” Karl makes a juicy fart noise with his mouth for proper emphasis. “We’re all distanced from government. It don’t mean anything in our lives. We’re in limbo.” He is undoubtedly quoting some right-wing columnist he read exactly two minutes ago in the Trenton Times. Karl couldn’t care less about government or limbo.
I, however, have nothing more I can do now, and my gaze wanders through the side door, back out to the lot, where the portable silver dog stand sits in the sun on its shiny new tires, its collapsible green-and-white awning furled above its delivery window, the whole outfit chained to a fifty-gallon oil drum filled with concrete that is itself bolted to a slab set in the ground (Karl’s idea for discouraging thievery). Seeing outside from this angle, though, and particularly viewing the feasible but also in most ways sweetly ridiculous hot dog trailer, makes me feel suddenly, unexpectedly distanced from all except what’s here, as though Karl and I were all each other had in the world. (Which of course isn’t true: Karl has nieces in Green Bay; I have two children in Connecticut, an ex-wife, and a girlfriend I’m right now keen to see.) Why this feeling, why now, why here, I couldn’t tell you.