The Luck of Franklin Olds
by David Barber
It was only at work that Dr Franklin Olds was superstitious.
For instance, the morning of the Bad Luck experiment, he’d opened his front door, bleary-eyed, to pick up the newspaper and been confronted by a magpie on the lawn.
According to the old English rhyme, one for sorrow, two for joy, solitary magpies are omens of ill-fortune, which the superstitious can ward off by saying, “Where’s your wife, Mr Magpie?”
The omen inclined its head to study him, or perhaps just to scan the grass for food. Franklin yawned and went back inside.
He’d just started work at Project Gold, amazing his parents that he’d managed to parlay his haphazard degrees into a top-secret job with the Air Force. “But you hate flying,” his mother had protested when he told them.
Franklin suspected it was secret because his employers were embarrassed by their use of tax dollars. This was the height of the Cold War and, assuming nuclear weapons stayed in their silos, it might need something from left-field to take down the Soviets. The U.S. Army had men staring at goats, the Air Force had Project Gold.
It was sited outside Eureka, in the foothills of the Klamath Mountains, an old radar station decommissioned in the 1950’s without even a hint of a Soviet bomber. Franklin imagined it would be a nice drive in the summer, though trickier now in these winter months.
He parked under the Keep Out sign and unlocked the gate. The radar array was long gone and the concrete bunkers smelt overpoweringly of damp, but the two wooden office buildings were perfectly serviceable.
He assumed that the presence of other people might compromise the experiments, so he’d told the Air Force he needed somewhere remote and wouldn’t need a secretary or assistants. Besides, he’d have to talk to them.
He huddled over a fan heater in his office, sipping coffee from a flask, until he couldn’t put the experiment off any longer. He trudged over to the other building and opened a fresh page in his lab book. “Friday 13 February 1981,” he wrote, and “Bad Luck Trial#8.” He’d decided that misfortune was easier to quantify than good luck. The previous seven trials had been painful but inconclusive.
First, there were mirrors to be broken, salt to be spilled, and thirteen horseshoes nailed upside down, (so their luck ran out), followed by walking under a ladder, (thirteen times) while flapping open the golf umbrella he’d borrowed from his father.
In the first days of the project, he’d acquired a black cat but found it impossible to get Millie to cross his path. He decided walking in front of her wasn’t the same thing. She stayed home now, keeping him company in the evenings.
Still out of breath, he sat down and taped the electrodes to his calf. He cleared his throat, then turned the dice tumbler.
Three. In his experiments, odd numbers equalled bad luck, which meant pressing the button that delivered the electric shock.
“Ow!” he protested, and put a tick in his lab book. After a minute, he turned the tumbler again. Even number. He relaxed and ticked the other column.
An hour later it was a 32/28 split. He’d repeat the whole run two more times, which was about as much bad luck as he could take in one day.
Each month he sent off a report and heard nothing back. He tried to imagine some Air Force Colonel reading Mitigating the Effects of Mirror Breakage by Self-Reflection During a Full Moon. He pictured the circular filing cabinet where it must have ended up. Perhaps the Air Force had forgotten him.
* * *
Driving home, it began to drizzle, which matched his mood. Being shocked times 93 times out of 180 was no more than chance, and he’d thrown everything at this trial.
The road unwound in his headlights, gleaming in the rain, almost hypnotic. Dispirited, the feeling crept over him that taking this job had been a mistake. He was getting paid, and his superiors weren’t breathing down his neck, but it was all going nowhere.
“Millie?” he called when she didn’t come to meet him. He had no illusions about cats, but she usually wanted to be fed.
She was tucked up on the sofa, next to a hippie. She was letting him scratch behind her ears, something she went out of her way to avoid with Franklin.
“Just leave,” Franklin warned, his heart beginning to pound. “Or I’ll call the police.”
“Sit down, Doc.”
“How did you get in? And how do you know—”
“You don’t need magic to open that back door, and your name’s on your mail. Sit down, man. We need to talk.”
Long grey hair dangled from the intruder’s bandanna, and his crusty jeans would leave a shadow on the fawn sofa.
Franklin cleared his throat. He was a reasonable man. “I’ll give you five minutes, then you go.”
“You got any idea what mayhem your spells are causing?”
Ah, he’d heard about Project Gold and thought Franklin was a sorcerer or something. It didn’t mean the man was delusional, this was California after all. Franklin had sourced his horseshoes and rabbit’s feet locally. He’d even asked about four-leafed clover, but ended up getting them from a mail-order company in Florida. Still, people gossiped. Perhaps they thought he was delusional, which might explain finding it hard to make friends here.
The hippie waved Franklin’s copy of The Times-Standard. “Another pile-up on the 101. And this lumber yard fire. You tinkering up there in the hills causes bad luck. I can feel what you’re doing, man. There’s chaos all around.”
“You can’t blame me for accidents,” protested Franklin. “They were just experiments.”
The hippie shook his head. “What you was doing was spells; you just didn’t know it. Spreading bad luck everywhere. You gotta stop.”
It had been a difficult day. Now some hippie was telling him what to do.
“It can’t be controlled, man.” The man was beginning to sound whiny. “That’s why I don’t mess no more.”
“You’ve had your say,” interrupted Franklin, and the hippie saw the look on his face and shrugged.
He turned at the door. “By the way, I ate a pizza slice from your refrigerator.”
* * *
Franklin argued back and forth with himself all weekend. Sometimes he sided with the hippie, not because spells worked and were dangerous, but because they didn’t and were pointless. He even draughted a letter of resignation to the Air Force, but woke on Sunday realising he’d never given Good Luck trials a shot. He drove out to Project Gold on Monday feeling something like his first enthusiasm.
He’d just sat down in his office when the phone rang.
He’d only used it once before, when someone from the Air Force called about an expenses claim he’d submitted for mirrors and a ladder. They’d talked at cross-purposes, Franklin worried about the amount, the Air Force sergeant thinking it was so paltry it must be a typo and he’d meant to claim more.
This time it wasn’t the Air Force.
“Dr Olds,” announced a man. “your nonsense is interfering with important work.”
Franklin stared at the phone. “Who is this?” he asked. “And how did you get this number?”
“Imagine trying to perform a task that requires skill, patience and immense concentration, then having some idiot start banging a drum.”
Franklin was attracting cranks like a magnet. Perhaps he should have expected it. “I don’t know what you—”
“That box on your desk,” interrupted the voice.
The cardboard box was full of four-leaf clovers, horseshoes and rabbit’s feet, still waiting for Franklin to decide how to measure good luck.
“How did you know—”
“I insist you cease immediately, else there will be consequences. And all those good luck charms won’t help you then.”
This was getting ridiculous. “Are you threatening the Air Force?”
The man snorted. “You’ve been warned,” he said and hung up.
Franklin was reluctant to tell the Air Force. They’d made him read and sign documents forbidding disclosure of Project Gold, though he’d never really taken it seriously until now. Wouldn’t they blame him for letting their secrets out? But this phone number was probably in the book. Besides, it was just a crank call.
He decided it was best if the Air Force didn’t get involved, and spent the rest of the day thinking about Good Luck trials, and whether it was ethical to gamble taxpayer’s money on horse races. Driving home, he got a flat tyre.
* * *
Next morning his freezer was dripping because the power had gone off overnight. He changed the fuses, but they just blew again. It took another day for an electrician to track down wires gnawed bare by some animal. Then he couldn’t find his car keys and was surprised how much time and money it took to replace them.
He was still struggling to convince himself all this bad luck was just a coincidence when Millie went missing.
She never stayed out. Franklin guessed she’d been mistreated in the past and didn’t trust the world. They weren’t especially fond of each other, but her disappearance just felt vindictive. He walked round the neighbourhood calling her name and waving a bowl of the fishy cat food she sometimes liked, but with no luck. But then, he didn’t find her body by the roadside either.
He drove out to Project Gold in a foul mood and set up Bad Luck Trial#9, the same as Trial#8, but with more ill-will. Much more. He ranted through each step. Don’t like me banging a drum, eh? Well, take that. And that. He winced his way through the tests. 133 shocks out of 180. “Was that noisy enough for you?” he demanded of the walls.
He was writing up Trial#9 in his office, when the phone rang again.
“I gave you fair notice,” the man snapped, as if they were in the middle of an argument.
“Look, if you’ve got Millie—”
“You had your warning, now face the consequences.”
Franklin sat in his car under the Keep Out sign for a while, then went back to his office for the box of good luck charms. He put them on the passenger seat and shook his head. Somehow he’d strayed from a legitimate study of chance into territory he didn’t like to think about.
On the highway, a deer darted out in front of the car, and swerving to avoid it, he skidded on gravel, ploughed through a fence and ended nose down in a ditch.
When everything swam back into focus, he had a lot of blood on his face from a scalp wound, and the inside of the car was festooned with four-leaf clovers and rabbit’s feet. It seemed he’d been struck by a horseshoe.
After that, he vaguely remembered an ambulance and a hospital, and them saying he’d been lucky and to take it easy for a few days. The painful stitches in his scalp kept reminding him he might have been killed. It was only a job after all.
* * *
With time on his hands, he rewrote his resignation letter. He couldn’t see how to explain events to the Air Force. Or the police. The envelope sat propped up on the kitchen table all week.
“I put all your luck things back in the box,” the mechanic said when he went to pick up his car.
“You sell that stuff?” The man gave him a curious look. “Didn’t seem to do you much good.”
Franklin shook his head and winced. Maybe the charms had mitigated events, maybe they hadn’t, but it wasn’t an experiment he cared to repeat. He’d set sail from the safe harbour of science into uncharted waters.
A steady downpour was beginning to pool round the buildings of Project Gold. Lucky, he had his father’s umbrella. He collected his things, unplugged equipment, then locked up for what proved to be the last time. Driving back down the road, his heart was curiously light.
A battered Toyota was parked at the junction with the highway, with its hood raised. Through his rain-blurred windshield, he saw a woman look up from the engine. He slowed to a halt and considered. She might need a hand, but a woman on her own needed to be careful about strange men. Still, a golf umbrella was a sure sign he wasn’t a psycho serial killer.
It turned out that Franklin couldn’t get her car’s engine started either, so he gave her a lift down into Eureka.
She didn’t comment on the box of horseshoes, rabbit’s feet and cellophane packets of four-leaf clovers he dumped onto the back seat. Her name was Ellie. She was tall and rangy, with striking features and hair that must have been red in her youth.
“You work at that Air Force place,” she said. After all, the road went nowhere else.
She’d been out viewing properties to rent as a studio. She was a potter. And a witch. “But mainly a potter because it’s easier than magic.”
“You don’t seem surprised,” she added.
“Not any more.”
Ellie asked questions as he drove, and he said more than he should. He was impressed by how quickly she got the hang of Project Gold.
“I’d say it was bad luck getting the job in the first place,” she mused. “What with getting zapped all day long. Good luck would be not doing the experiments at all.”
He’d filled a notebook with conundrums like that.
She studied him as he drove. “I could have broken down anywhere. Was it chance you just happened along?”
He pondered that, after all, it was his job. Had been his job.
“I’ve spent months trying to show luck can be manipulated—”
“You don’t think it can?”
He shrugged. “I did proper research once. Investigating why people believe in superstitions. Like crossing your fingers to influence events you can’t actually control. That’s the only thing Project Gold showed.”
“Hmm,” she said. “But you do need to stop annoying folk with those experiments. If you’re sensitive, they create a kind of disturbance.”
“Like banging a drum.”
“Just stop,” she said, frowning. “As a favour to us witches. Not everyone’s as nice as me. Some nasty types out there.”
“Yes, one took my cat.”
Ellie shook her head. “Most folk have got some ability. Some more than others. I know people who could teach you things. But just you, not the Air Force.”
The Air Force wanted proof, and all he had was anecdotes, a box of charms and a head wound. Perhaps there were people out there who could influence chance. Is that what magic was? “I’ve finished with the Air Force.”
He didn’t know he was going to say that. By then they were in Eureka, and in a moment he would drop her off and never see her again.
He cleared his throat. “Ah, I was wondering if you’d like to go for a coffee?”
Main Street was busy, but then a space came free right outside a coffee shop. Franklin swerved in and turned off the engine.
“That was lucky,” said Ellie.
The rain stopped and watery sunlight gleamed on the wet road.
“I think you’re starting to get the hang of it,” she said.
Copyright © 2023 by David Barber
