The Return of Count Electric & Other Stories

by William Browning Spencer

  In the grocery store lines his face stared at me from People magazine. Newspapers and television also carried his image. I tried to write another novel, but my thoughts would be scattered by the din of his typewriter, and my resolve would be crushed by the force of his hideous industry.

  My telephone soliciting job suffered. I found myself asking total strangers: “Do you read Stephen King?” and when they answered in the affirmative, I would hang up without even attempting a magazine sale.

  And then Elaine began having an affair with him. I know. I know. It seems outrageous, doesn’t it? But on the title page of her copy of Misery was written: “To Elaine—You are my premier hot mamma, Big Steve.”

  “What’s this?” I had demanded of Elaine.

  “Steve Clarendon in Appliances gave me the book. He knows I love Stephen King, and he knew it was my birthday, something you forgot,” she said. But I know guilt when I see it. I know a woman caught in adultery.

  He would call in the night, and I would answer the phone and hear him breathing. He wouldn’t talk to me, of course. “Big Steve,” I would say. “Leave my wife alone.”

  I am a strong-willed man and I might have been able to go on, but the republication of The Stand, twice as big, kicked me over the edge. I broke the window of the Crown bookstore that contained a display of the obscenely fat book, and, had they not wrestled the gasoline can from me, I would have initiated a roaring bonfire.

  I am not, today, repentant—and my doctor, Dr. Abram, knows it.

  “And why,” he asks, reasonably enough, “would Stephen King, a world famous author who lives in Maine, carry on an affair with your wife, who lives here in Northern Virginia?”

  “That is a good question, Dr. Abram.” I try to offer positive reinforcement when Dr. Abram asks an intelligent question. “I have, of course, given it considerable thought. I don’t know. I have thought perhaps that he is not one man. I have thought that he is the army of the anti-Christ. Perhaps my affliction, that of being cuckolded as a man and ruined as a writer, will begin to befall others. Perhaps you will begin to have many cases like mine, and it will be revealed that Stephen King is a whole army of look-alikes doing Satan’s bidding.”

  “Stephen King as the anti-Christ seems a bit far-fetched,” my shrink says.

  I shrug my shoulders. “The man’s eyebrows are demonic,” I say.

  Dr. Abram shakes his head sadly.

  I have no time to convince Dr. Abram. And what function would it serve? My own soul is lost.

  Does that sound melodramatic? Last week, I was in the rec room with my fellow inmates. We were watching some insipid television show about undercover cops in women’s clothing. Hugely depressed, I grabbed a paperback and retired to my room. I read half of it before realizing that this tale of vampires was entitled Salems Lot and that its author was … you know its author.

  It was too late then, and like a man lost to vice, I read recklessly, abandoning myself to the words. The next day I scavenged Carrie from a pile of paperback gothics.

  I will read whatever of his books I can find in this madhouse. And then—for I have no shame—I will beg my faithless wife to bring me those I still haven’t read.

  I hear they are coming out with a collection of his blurbs, those quotes that he has strewn across the covers of other authors’ books. This may be a rumor. So many rumors surround him.

  The Entomologists At Obala

  Dear Janey—

  I will be giving this letter to a large, evil-looking old man named Saul who will take it back to Limón. Saul is a devout Christian and has carved a fish symbol on his forehead and crosses on his cheeks.

  Who knows when this letter will reach you. I am in the rain forest with Father, having fast-talked him into keeping me with him for this last leg of the trip. It was close. I was actually at the airport before tears and a sort of fainting fit convinced him that I should accompany him.

  What’s all the fuss, I’d like to know? I’ve been camping before, and this is nothing special. It’s an easy walk for the most part, since there isn’t much undergrowth in this twilight world. We are still three days away from where the wasps (Philanthus giganticus, in case you are taking notes) are supposed to be.

  My hair has gone limp, just died. And some fucking bug bit me on the forehead and I look like I’m sprouting a third eye. I’m glad Mark isn’t here to see me. Father’s in a foul mood because a box of film was either stolen or lost, and my Walkman has been destroyed by—get this!—ants, so I won’t be listening to Michael Bolton in the jungle. Talk about roughing it!

  How are you and Tommy getting along? Was it just a steamy semester’s romance or is it lasting through the summer? I was thinking we should rent an apartment off campus next year. I’m sick of dorms.

  Eve Harper stopped writing. She unsnapped the tent flap and looked out into the darkness. She could see her father’s tent, illuminated from within, and assumed that he was sorting the insects he had collected during the day. Beyond his tent, the darkness was immense and filled with noises Eve couldn’t identify—which, she thought, was just as well. And somewhere out there Saul and the three other dark-skinned, silent men who had helped lug the equipment into the rain forest lay sleeping.

  Eve felt something skitter across her hand, and she quickly dropped the tent flap.

  She returned to the letter and wrote:

  This is a great adventure but, as usual, Father is doing his damnedest to make it dull. Every new bug he scoops up comes with a lecture. I try to look interested, so he won’t regret bringing me, but I’m not riveted, you understand. I know he’d be shocked, but the truth is I think bugs are basically for stomping.

  Anyway, in two days we are supposed to be in Obala and then it is just another day’s trek—isn’t that a wonderful word!—to the wasp colony. Wish me luck. Your intrepid explorer,

  Eve.

  The town of Obala was, as Dr. Harper had expected, less hospitable than the jungle. Stray, hunger-maddened dogs roamed the dirt streets and ragged loungers passed the time by pitching rocks at the mongrels. A barracks, created during an enterprising dictator’s regime, had been roughly converted into a hotel. The room Dr. Harper rented was the most minimal of sleeping compartments, with two cots, a broken window that had been repaired with cardboard and tape, a dresser missing one drawer, and a frail, lopsided wooden chair that no prudent person would ever sit on. The last tenant had left an empty vodka bottle on the floor in the middle of the room.

  “Not four stars,” Dr. Harper said.

  “I think it’s quaint,” his daughter said, patting his shoulder.

  “Yes, and Charles Manson is cute,” her father said. “Well, let’s get our stuff in here, and then I’ll set about devising a real lock for this door. This looks like the perfect place for having one’s throat cut.”

  Dr. Harper did not have a high opinion of his fellow man. The worst part of these expeditions, which had comprised the better part of his summers for the last twelve years, consisted of his interaction with the humanity that inhabited these regions. There was a law of nature at work here. Wherever a delightful and exotic insect dwelt, there also dwelt—often in military garb—vile, untrustworthy men.

  For this reason—among many other excellent reasons—he had been reluctant to bring Eve. The plan had been to show her some of the cities on the coast and then send her back to Boston. His daughter had known, however, that he was defenseless when it came to her whims, and she had decided to stay. She always won in these battles of will.

  At least this was not to be an arduous expedition. The country was in a period of relative tranquility and prosperity.

  That night Dr. Harper and his daughter ate at a restaurant that was surprisingly clean and well-regulated. The food was excellent, and the proprietress, a large woman in a black dress, saw to it that their wine glasses remained filled and that they were served in a timely, elegant fashion.

  The only disruptive element was the appearance, midway through the
meal, of a fat man wearing a blue polo shirt and khaki slacks. This man, middle-aged and balding, was accompanied by a short, unhappy woman and a young man, equally gloomy, whose disgusted and bored expression declared that he was in the company of his parents.

  The fat man was one of those individuals who seem to revel in abrasiveness. He complained loudly, urging his fellow diners to observe how ill-used he was. “What sort of a wine is this?” he bellowed. “What sort of a fool do they think I am? Do they think I’d actually drink this?”

  Ordinarily, this sort of behavior would have been easily ignored by Dr. Harper, who didn’t expect much of his fellows. But it was not lost on Dr. Harper that the native customers were all observing this man with polite distaste. It also occurred to Dr. Harper that this man, so obviously American, was a fellow countryman and might, therefore, seem representative. That Dr. Harper might find himself grouped, in the local mind, with this offensive bumpkin irritated the professor and kept him from the full enjoyment of his meal.

  On leaving, Dr. Harper was complimenting his hostess at length—and she was beaming mightily—when a meaty hand was clasped on his shoulder.

  “My God, an American! It’s good to see a white face.”

  Dr. Harper turned.

  “Bob Gentry,” the man said, and waving a hand, he introduced his wife and son, who were tucked behind him like rueful mendicants in the shadow of their lord. “Harriet and Kurt.”

  Reluctantly, Dr. Harper introduced himself and his daughter.

  Gentry leaned forward and narrowed his eyes. “You are not Dr. Philip ‘Hymenoptera’ Harper, are you? You are not the man who wrote ‘Sexual Specific Mound Building in Select Formicinae’?”

  Dr. Harper admitted that he was.

  Gentry slapped him on the back. “Damned small planet, Harper. I’m Dr. Robert Gentry. Spiders. You may have seen my article on adaptive coloration and mating behavior in Migidae in Modern Arachnid last month.”

  “I don’t have much time to read outside my field,” Dr. Harper said. No sense in encouraging the man.

  “Of course, of course,” Gentry said, continuing to thump Harper on the back. “The social insects are the stars of entomology. The rest of us are in their shadow.”

  Dr. Harper found himself at a table drinking a glass of wine while Gentry talked. The man was an incredible braggart, and seemed to have published a number of articles in popular, even sensational, journals—if, in fact, he were to be believed.

  Mrs. Gentry seemed bored, perhaps drunk, and Dr. Harper was surprised to discover that she was attending to what her husband said. “That was in Yablis,” she would suddenly say. “The flies were awful, awful.” Then grim silence would overtake her again.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Dr. Harper noticed that his daughter and the pale young man who was Gentry’s son were chatting easily, leaning toward each other across the table. Occasionally his daughter would laugh, with her sharp, over-loud bark that had jumped a generation from his own father. At least, Harper thought, she is enjoying herself.

  This Gentry fellow was proving to be an opinionated, condescending bore who seemed to possess some personal antipathy toward wasps and bees and ants—those creatures that Dr. Harper had devoted his life to.

  “This hive stuff bores me sick,” Gentry said. “A lot of bullshit.” The man leaned forward and clutched Dr. Harper’s shoulder. “Wolf spiders are the magnificent lords of the grass,” Gentry said. “Solitary, ruthless predators.”

  Dr. Harper rose, disengaging himself from the man’s grip, and protested that he had an early rising ahead of him and needed his sleep.

  “As do I,” Dr. Gentry laughed. “Perhaps we’ll see each other in the fields.”

  “Perhaps,” Dr. Harper said, confident that the jungles around Obala were sufficiently vast to prevent it.

  In the morning, Dr. Harper woke feeling ill, head pounding, mouth parched. Only the thought of escaping Obala and the self-satisfied Gentry could compel him to rise. But once up and moving, he began to feel better.

  In the bathroom down the hall, a large and hirsute spider crouched in the shower stall. Dr. Harper removed a sandal and whacked the spider with it. The spider made a satisfying sound, like spit on a hot griddle, and Harper scraped it down the drain. He felt oddly triumphant.

  Dear Janey—

  Just a quick note. The porters are on their way back to Obala within the hour, and I want this letter to go with them. It is always iffy whether these letters will make it or not. The postage stamp is not powerful magic in these parts.

  We have arrived at our destination (I love that sentence, and I think, really, it is why I wanted to come all the way with Father). Father now spends the better part of every day sitting out in this field with his camera and a whole necklace of lenses. The field is pocked with sandy mounds and all these things that, at first, you might think were big dragonflies. They are wasps, yellow spotted, low-flying, spider-stinging wasps. Dozens of them dart over the tall grass.

  This is your natural history lesson for the day, so don’t doze off or stick your tongue in Tommy’s ear when you are supposed to be reading MY LETTER. Okay. These big wasps—the females—spend all their time looking for spiders, and when they see a spider they swoop down on it and sting it and then lay their eggs on it and take it back to the burrow.

  Here’s the yucky part—yeah, I know, it is all sort of semiyucky: the spider isn’t dead. The spider is just paralyzed, so that when the wasp larva hatches it has fresh food. Gross, right?

  That’s the end of that natural history lesson, and I will now proceed to my own natural history—which is far more interesting.

  I have met this terrific guy, Kurt, who is down here with his parents. His father is also an entomologist. We only met briefly, but I was smitten. I think love is a sort of karmic thing, and not a function of time anyway. Like you might love someone because you knew him in a previous reincarnation. Anyway, he has got these great black eyelashes and this sweet smile and he is very funny and charming and about four million times more sensitive than Mr. Mark “Football & Beer” Buckley.

  I could tell he liked me too, despite the fact that I look like a mosquito’s idea of a pizza these days. We are going to try to see each other again. I told him what I knew, which was that Father was going off to study a famous—well, among entomologists—wasp colony, and Kurt said his father would know where that was. So Kurt is going to try to steer his parents in our direction so he can see me.

  I hope he can do it. There isn’t a whole hell of a lot else going on. I’m not about to complain, because Father will just say I didn’t have to come and that, in fact, I insisted on coming. Father is your basic I-told-you-so personality, so much so that it is a sickness with him, and I’m not going to give him that satisfaction.

  This place has it moments anyway. Yesterday it rained like crazy in the morning and then, when it stopped, these huge mists rolled in, like something in a dream, and the trees seemed to stretch all the way to the sky and I probably could have climbed right up to the giant’s castle and stolen the golden goose except I’m scared of heights. Anyway, it was heavy-duty beautiful.

  Your jungle correspondent—Eve.

  Kurt Gentry had never written a poem before, and it wasn’t coming along too great. “Your eyes are like slices of heaven,” he wrote. Kurt stopped writing and flopped on his back.

  His circle of vision consisted of blue sky invaded by gnarled tree limbs with bulbous, waxy leaves. He sat up again and regarded his father, who was fifty or sixty feet away in tall, yellow grass. The old man hunched over a tripod-mounted camera like a paunchy, inept assassin waiting for a minor dignitary. He was, Kurt knew, actually waiting for a spider to pop out of a little silver-dollar-sized trap door made of sod and devour some unwary beetle. It was an odd thing for a grown man to wait on. This sort of parental activity had convinced Kurt, long ago, to pursue a career in business administration and one day get a job in an air-conditioned office where the only bugs were in y
our computer program. Kurt was accompanying his parents this year because—dismally—the alternative had been summer school and a job at the Qwik Mart.

  He stopped watching his father—a dull pastime if ever there were one—and turned to watch his mother who had just come out of the tent and was fixing dinner. She was wearing a large, yellow sunhat and a blue dress that contained enough material for two dresses and touched the tops of her worn boots.

  As usual, his mother’s industry and domesticity irritated Kurt, drove him wild in fact. He envisioned soaking her in the lighter fluid that she was presently sprinkling over charcoal and setting her on fire. This is not to say that he did not love her; he did. But there was something about her that sucked the excitement from all things surrounding her. Like anti-gravity, except this was anti-adventure. Like a human black hole that gathered all the light rays of possibility and bent them into one narrow path.

  If Indiana Jones had traveled with my mother, Kurt thought, nothing would ever have happened.

  This thought presented itself with such bleak conviction that Kurt flinched away from it and returned to the poem he was writing.

  “Your eyes are like slices of heaven, your lips glisten as though you have just eaten a cherry popsicle.”

  Kurt’s friend Mort “Waxy” Baker had said that poetry was the best way to get chicks. “Poetry excites their erotic centers,” Waxy had said.

  Kurt was quickly coming to the conclusion that poetry was beyond him. He would have to rely on alcohol. He would steal some of his father’s bourbon and get her drunk on Cokes and bourbon.

  That is, of course, if he ever saw her again. My god, she might be lost to me forever. This thought made him sick. “Eve,” he groaned, and he stretched his hands to the sky.

  Lying on his back under the shade of the tree, he grew drowsy and may actually have been sleeping when his father leaned over him and said, “If I was a vulture, I would have snapped your eyes out.”