“Okay,” Eve said. She hugged him again. “I love you.”
“Me too,” he said and was gone.
And he did love her. Oh she was beautiful, more beautiful than the stars or the crappy poetry he had written her. She was beautiful right to her soul, and brave and noble.
As Kurt hoisted the bag of spiders over his shoulder, he realized he did not deserve her. He knew he couldn’t have done what she had just done.
Well, he would do his part. He hurried on, keeping the flashlight’s beam low to the ground, following its pale grey circle of illuminated grass.
“Dad,” he whispered, leaning down and peering in the tent. He could make out his mother’s frazzled hair above the rumpled sheet, but his father’s sleeping bag was empty.
Maybe he’s taking a leak, Kurt thought, and he lay the sack down and went in search of his errant sire.
But his father was not in the immediate vicinity, and with a sense of growing dread, Kurt walked out into the fields.
He saw him then—or what had to be him, a stooped figure in the roped-off area. Kurt shouted, but clapped his mouth shut on the shout, realizing that the last thing he wanted was to wake Dr. Harper.
The truncated shout was enough to send the man in the fields running, and Kurt ran after him. But Kurt forgot the staked rope, and it sent him sailing, effortlessly. He executed a belly flop in the sand and the flashlight rolled across the ground.
Crawling on his knees, he patted the ground. There! But no, it wasn’t the flashlight, merely an empty can. Discarding it, he continued to blindly feel for the flashlight. Ah! He clutched it, flicked the switch. It still worked. He played the beam over the ground. A white, powdery dust covered the sand. What’s this?, he wondered. The beam fell on the cylindrical can that, for a moment, had fooled him into thinking it was a flashlight. He lifted it up and read the label. The skull and crossbones said it all, and before he had identified the poison and its use, he understood.
“Great Dad, just great. Shit.”
Kurt stood up. Tears puffed into his eyes. Eve had tried so damned hard, so goddam hard and brave and all for goddam nothing. I mean, this was fucking unforgivable.
Wait, Kurt thought, maybe it isn’t too late. Maybe I can scoff this poison back up before it kills the wasps.
Kurt got down on his knees and began using his hands to scrape the powder back into the empty can. Why not? Why not?
The first wasp stung Kurt on the cheek, and then, as though they had agreed upon some silent signal, a dozen wasps stung him on the neck and face and on his hands.
“Aaaaaah,” Kurt said, standing up. He felt dizzy, suddenly chilled. He took a step forward and fell to his knees. Just great, he thought.
Oh Janey. I am leaving this letter where father can find it. I have no reason to go on living. My Kurt is dead. I went looking for him and I found him. I have returned to my tent just long enough to record these last words and then I will slip into Father’s room for the last time in my life. I will steal a bottle of wine he keeps in his trunk, and I will steal the pills that are always within his reach in case he cannot sleep.
I don’t know what happened. I think the wasps killed Kurt somehow. I guess it’s that damned karma I always talk about. We tried to set things right. I gave the hostage spiders back. But it was too late. It was always too late. We were doomed.
I want you to have all my tapes and CDs. You have been a good friend. Love always, Eve.
Dr. Harper, awakening early and discovering the theft of the spiders, bolted from his tent. In his haste, he set off one of the trip wires and was rewarded with a crackle of flashbulbs.
“Jesus,” Harper growled.
He pushed off across the field, his one thought to have Gentry’s throat between his hands. And then he saw them.
The boy lay sprawled on his back, and Eve lay with her head on his chest. Dr. Harper’s first thought was that he had surprised the teenagers in a sexual liaison, but he was immediately disabused of this notion by the dread stillness of the couple and the abstract and impersonal angle of Kurt Gentry’s head.
“Oh my God!” Harper screamed.
Dear Janey—
I am not dead after all. Neither is Kurt. Wasp stings depress breathing, and Father had some adrenalin along for just such an emergency. We both looked pretty dead, I guess. It unsettled Father. He still looks sort of astonished.
I’m not dead, so the deal is off about the tapes and the CDs. Sorry.
I drank a whole bottle of wine and swallowed a bottle of vitamin C.
Hey, the light was lousy in my father’s tent. But my heart was in the right place.
I am glad anyway that tragedy was avoided. Kurt is doing fine, although he moves sort of slowly and occasionally forgets his name. The doctors say this will pass. Dr. Gentry and Father have not, however, reconciled. Lawsuits are on the horizon if the Entomologists’ Arbitration League fails in its efforts to reconcile our parents—and I believe it will fail.
I’m looking forward to the new semester, how about you? Tell Mark that if he wants to meet my train it will be arriving on September second at two in the afternoon. Don’t say I told you. Just say it would be a nice surprise. Love,
Eve.
The Return of Count Electric
1
Two weeks after my mother died, I received a letter from Harriet Goddard, my mother’s best friend. The letter was a brief note of commiseration. She apologized for failing to attend the funeral. She had been prevented by extreme ill-health and had had to exert all her efforts toward postponing her own funeral through the use of folk remedies and bed rest. Weakened but recovering, Mrs. Goddard was now taking the opportunity to write. She included a sealed letter my mother had entrusted to her nine years ago.
“Frankly,” Mrs. Goddard wrote, “I had forgotten the existence of this letter, only coming upon it two days ago in a book of photos which I had Will bring down from the attic.”
I ceased reading Harriet’s letter to heft my mother’s sealed envelope in my hand. “Mark Pearson!” she had written. The exclamation point after my name was characteristic of my mother. She had been a shrill, exclamatory woman. The envelope was yellow—not the result of age but rather my mother’s delight in brightly colored stationery—and bulky. It filled me with misgivings. I do not like surprises. I yearn for order and cleanliness. Even as a child I hated Christmas, all those damnable gifts, those gaudy secrets. I like a thing to be forthright about what it is, not hidden in wrapping paper covered with elves. No telling what is inside. All that prettiness could hide something really horrible: a knot of snakes, perhaps.
So I looked at this sealed envelope and considered throwing it away unopened. Mrs. Goddard seemed to advise doing just that. “No doubt,” she had written, “your mother forgot—just as I did—the existence of this letter. Had she remembered, she might have asked me to destroy it long ago. She gave it to me when she was living briefly with us, having just separated from your father. You were living in Los Angeles or San Francisco—someplace in California—and I know your mother felt quite alone in the world. It is not easy to leave a man you have lived with for forty years, and she was deeply depressed. I suspect that the letter was written in despair and may even—poor Lila!—be a sort of suicide note.
“I hope it will not cause you any pain—I am still not certain I am doing the right thing in sending it along—and I urge you to consider that it was written nine years ago during difficult times.”
Damning curiosity, I ripped the letter open. No snakes. I discovered a two-page letter and a dozen or so newspaper clippings. I blinked at the newsprint. The dry phrases of objective journalism rose up like steam.… had been missing for three days. Police refused to comment … abrasions and puncture wounds. Death however appears to be the result of electrical shock … very high voltage … electrocuted. Similarities in all four deaths suggest a single killer. Dorothy Simpson, who police and newspapers are now describing as Count Electric’s seventh victim, was last
seen …
I turned to my mother’s note. “Mark,” it began, like a shout from the back door. “Dear God, help me, I think your father is Count Electric!”
I laughed out loud, got up and went to the window. My apartment overlooked the beltway, and the last of the rush hour traffic grimly poured out of Washington, headlights anticipating the dark. It was seven in the evening and I had spent the day writing a proposal for a government contract. I had, in other words, spent the day lying, inflating the credentials of people who probably wouldn’t even be available for the project and “implementing” this and “facilitating” that and generally trying to give the impression that we were the sort of pretentious, bureaucratic sycophants that the Defense department would enjoy doing business with. It was exhausting work and had put me in a black mood. My mother’s opening sentence, so like my mother in its sense of breathless revelation, instantly cheered me.
I thought about my father. The funeral was the first time I had seen him in over a year. He looked somehow fraudulent in a suit, for in my mind he is always wearing green slacks and a tan shirt with the logo of the air conditioning and heating company he worked for. I went over and spoke to him. There were tears in his eyes, and he looked much older than when I had last seen him. He wore a scarf too, which seemed unwarranted. It was a balmy April afternoon. We had talked about the loveliness of the flowers, the blessing of a quick, as opposed to lingering, death, etc.
Now I tried to imagine my father as Count Electric, Fairfax’s most diabolical serial killer, a madman who killed at least eight women in the course of two years. I couldn’t do it.
I had not visited my father since his retirement to Water-ford, a small Northern Virginia town perhaps fifty miles outside of Washington, D.C. and of some vague historical significance.
I returned to the sofa and picked up my mother’s nine-year old revelation and read on. To her credit, she too had some difficulty with the concept of old Harry Pearson as serial murderer and pervert. I say pervert because the newspaper accounts, although vague, suggested that the murderer was driven by warped and hideously inverted sexual impulses. The women who fell afoul of Count Electric were discovered bound and naked. They had been electrocuted. They had also been the victims of some sexual outrage that had inspired one homicide investigator to say, “We are dealing with a very deviant personality. A very sick character.” When asked to comment further, the man had merely shaken his head.
My father was not inclined to show his true feelings. He was frugal with his inner self. Aside from announcing every evening that he was “beat,” “whupped” or “goddam exhausted,” he didn’t keep us posted on his spiritual and emotional life. We were largely in the dark with my father—but it didn’t seem such an impenetrable darkness that a Count Electric could have crouched in it without our noticing. My father simply wasn’t enough of an actor to hide such a personality. Then too, the notes that Count Electric began leaving at the scenes of his crimes seemed utterly foreign to my father’s nature. Those notes that the press had chosen to reveal were always signed Count Electric and were in quotes, like blurbs from movie reviews. “Stimulating!” a note might read. Or: “A powerful experience. Electrifying!” Or, my favorite: “A shocking, Post-Modern expression of technological alienation.” These notes were typed on three-by-five index cards and left on the victims’ bare stomachs. It was easier imagining my father as a murderer than as the writer of such notes, and my mother seemed to share that view.
My mother had discovered the newspaper clippings in a dusty suitcase in the toolshed. She rarely visited that spider-haunted refuge for rusting lawnmowers, broken-toothed saws, air conditioning parts and lumber, but, in a frenzied search for gardening gloves, she had left no stone unturned, no suitcase unopened, and so she had come upon the clippings.
Her discovery occurred in 1983. The murders themselves, never solved, occurred in 1976 and ’77. Apparently the clippings had lain in hiding for six years.
Well, it seemed to me that my mother was taking a rather large leap here, from her husband’s possessing gruesome newspaper clippings to her husband’s being the subject of those clippings. A fascination with serial killers is not unusual—books on the subject do a brisk business—and I assumed my father was simply indulging a furtive hobby.
I should have given my mother more credit. I read on. “I know what you are thinking,” her note said. “You are thinking your mother is overreacting. You may even be shaking your head in that superior way that makes you appear retarded.” No, it was the machine that filled her with dread. She was unable to describe it precisely. It was “evil, spider-like”; the electric cord coming out of it was “like a devil’s tail.” She thought there might be blood on some of the needles although of course it could have been rust. The machine bristled with needles. It was obscene, pornographic. She didn’t like thinking about it.
The suitcase that held the clippings also contained this infernal machine, this proof of my father’s guilt. I was less convinced, knowing my mother for a woman who saw all machines as menacing and alien.
The rest of my mother’s letter consisted of some fancy wrestling with her conscience. Should she call the police? Should she keep silent? On reflection, she conceded that my father might not be Count Electric. The machine might not be a killing machine. It could all prove embarrassing. And no killings had occurred in six years … Eventually a dread of public humiliation and scandal conquered her moral ambivalence, and she wrote this letter rather than go to the police. The letter ended dramatically: “Pray your father is an innocent man! I would rather be a foolish, paranoid old woman than the wife of a murderer!” Obviously, she never did contact the police, but her doubts were sufficient to make her leave the old man.
I put the letter and newspaper clippings in a desk drawer and went into the kitchen to fix myself dinner. Later that night I called my father. I think he was surprised to hear from me. His voice had the wary tone of a man expecting to be asked for money. We managed to talk for about fifteen awkward minutes, and by the end of the conversation I had a half-hearted invitation to drop by.
After the telephone conversation, I went into the living room and listened to Beethoven. I drank some wine and thought how nice it would be if my father were, in fact, Count Electric. I could see my secretary looking at me differently when I replied, “Yes, it’s true. My father is Count Electric.” How exactly would I say it? I think I would sigh, look vaguely disgusted, produce a rueful smile as if to say, “One’s stuck with one’s family, isn’t one?”
At around ten that evening the phone rang. It was Elizabeth reminding me that we were having dinner with John and Elaine on Saturday.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Mark, what do you mean you don’t know?”
“I told my father I’d come out on Saturday.”
“Mark. Really, you can be so thoughtless.”
“I’m not thoughtless,” I said. “My mother just died. Wanting to see my father in the wake of such an event can hardly be called thoughtless.”
That silenced her. We talked for awhile about the office, and then I told her I would see her on Monday and hung up. Elizabeth is all right, but unless I am very much mistaken, she wants to have sex with me and that isn’t going to happen.
I woke that Saturday with the old numbness gripping my left side. I couldn’t feel my foot when it touched the floor. But moving around, shaving, making coffee, I began to feel better. The migraine failed to materialize and by the time I was on the road I was feeling fine.
2
My father was, of course, surprised to see me on his doorstep, but he accepted my arrival with good grace, even managed a smile although I caught an expression closer to dismay when I glanced in the hall mirror.
It was a tidy little house, brick, pretty much what I would have expected. My father had developed an enthusiasm for gardening that surprised me, and as punishment for popping in on him, he took me out in the garden and talked about plants and
fertilizers and the weather. All the while the sun hissed overhead like a frying egg, and a yellow jacket buzzed around my mouth seeking entrance, as though I were a magic grotto full of honey. It was unpleasant, and when we got back inside I found the cool shade of the sofa and stayed there. I saw that my father owned a small television, and I moved as far from it as the sofa would permit.
My father, seeing this wasn’t a brief visit, offered me supper. After we ate we went back to the living room and my father offered me a beer which I accepted. He didn’t seem to know just how to get rid of me, and I chatted on about my job, oblivious of the time.
Finally—and I could see it took some effort—he suggested that I stay the night. It was late, after all; I could drive home in the morning. So I thanked him and kept on talking.
One of my father’s favorite subjects was local politics, so I had no difficulty setting him on that track. I let him have his head for awhile and then I mentioned a politician named David Hart. “Whatever became of him?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. He tried to make a comeback, but it failed. I think the public had lost faith in him.”
I knew of course that Hart had been district attorney when the Count Electric murders had occurred and that it was Hart’s failure to bring the killer to justice that had ruined his career. But I am a subtle man. “Lost faith?” I asked.
“He couldn’t catch Count Electric, the serial murderer. He said he would and he didn’t. Most folks saw it as a lie.”
“I wonder what became of Count Electric,” I said.
My father blinked at me. He seemed strangely agitated. He leaned forward, “Count Electric is dead,” he said.
I laughed. “You say that with some conviction. Did you kill him?”
It was my imagination and the darkness of the room, no doubt, but my father seemed on the verge of saying something far different from what he in fact said. He said: “Most of the psychological studies suggest the man must have killed himself. These serial killers don’t just retire. They keep at it until they are caught or until they unravel. I expect they just never matched up the suicide with the madman.” My father paused, slapped his hands on his knees. “I’m going to bed. I’ll get you some blankets for the sofa. You are free to come to church with me in the morning although I don’t expect you’ll care to. You and your mother were never churchgoers.”
The Return of Count Electric & Other Stories Page 5
