The Return of Count Electric & Other Stories

by William Browning Spencer

  “Where did your friend Howie go?” I asked.

  Ellie shrugged her shoulders. “We got to make a moat for this castle, Lou,” she said.

  “Maybe a shark got him” I said. “I saw a big one out there.”

  That night, me and Dad and Ellie were eating supper, TV dinners the old man cooked in the microwave, making a big production of it, like he was some fancy chef. He had Ellie giggling every time he called her mademoiselle.

  “You young folks should go out to a nightclub, go dancing,” he said. “That’s what I’d do.” He elbowed me and gave me that slow wink that I remembered growing up. I never did care for it. “If I had a pretty girl I’d take her dancing every night.”

  “Lou don’t dance,” Ellie said.

  Dad’s eyebrows went up. “He don’t. It’s hard to credit he’s my son. Maybe his momma was seeing a preacher behind my back. I’m a dancing fool myself.” He spun around, one hand on his hip. “I would dance them women dizzy.”

  Dad went out into the living room, and when he came back, this old, corny rockabilly music followed him.

  He reached over and tugged Ellie out of her chair. Still laughing, they danced around the kitchen. My old man wiggled his butt and shouted at me: “It’s a crime not letting this girl dance.”

  I went to the fridge and got a beer. I opened it and poured its contents down my throat. I sat back down. Let them have their fun, I thought, and I did. I let them go through about four numbers while I drank another beer. Then I thought: That’s enough. I went into the living room and shut off the record player.

  “Hey!” Dad shouted, coming into the room. Beads of sweat dotted his temples and his shirt stuck to him. “You are forgetting whose house this is.”

  “Well,” I said, “I appreciate your hospitality. I just don’t want you to overdo it.” I walked up to him and looked him in the eyes. “The hospitality,” I said. “I don’t want you to overdo the hospitality.”

  He glared back at me, like he might want to make something of it, but he decided against it, shrugged his shoulders, and went back into the kitchen. I heard him say to Ellie, “That boy has always had a briar up his butt.” I heard Ellie laugh.

  MALCOLM

  Ten miles south of Gainesville, I pulled the car to the side of the road, got out and vomited.

  I am not a good traveler. I do not like driving for hours on end, stopping only to relieve oneself in restrooms defaced with various homosexual come-ons, and living marginally on expensive synthetic road food. I do not like having my life imperiled by amphetamine-deranged truck drivers or having to seek out some interstate gas station every hour in order to scrub the slime of a thousand smashed insects—whose guts could, no doubt, serve as the ultimate super glue—from my windshield.

  These bugs were an industry. They were called love bugs because they mated on the highway, huge clouds of them. I bought this small blue and white can of stuff designed especially to dissolve their innards. The service stations also sold screens to put over your car’s grill so that the bugs wouldn’t fly into your radiator and cause your car to overheat and blow up. Never underestimate nature. I bought one of the screens, too.

  Having vomited, I leaned against my car and stared out at what appeared to be water buffalo and large, white birds. Dots swam before my eyes, dots which proved to be small, malevolent mosquitoes. I slapped at them and climbed back into the car.

  This was all my mother’s fault. I had mentioned to her that I might drive to Florida, and she had responded with unwarranted negativity.

  “You don’t want to go to Florida,” she said. When I was away at college, my mother had gone to Miami with my father, their first vacation in years. This was a year before their divorce. Relations were already strained.

  “Florida is hell,” my mother said. In Florida, according to my mother, the air conditioning does not work, the showers have no hot water, hotel room service is nonexistent, the beaches are crowded and dangerous, the heat is unbearable. An odor of dead fish hangs over the state like an Old Testament curse.

  I told her I did not plan on going to Miami, that my intention was to drive down the gulf coast to St. Petersburg.

  “Texas has a gulf coast,” my mother argued. “It’s closer and cleaner and cheaper.”

  The argument managed to escalate until I found myself saying, “I don’t want to discuss it. I’m going.”

  And so I discovered that what had been idle, out-loud daydreaming became, thanks to my mother’s adamant opposition, action.

  Sick and disgusted with myself, I wasn’t about to turn back. Besides, I was almost there. A few more hours and I’d be in St. Petersburg.

  What then? Well, I’d had time to think about that on the way down. Granted, discovering the whereabouts of Eleanor Greer and Lou Willis had been a sort of exercise, a test of my investigative powers. Granted, also, that I was making this trip in childish defiance of my mother’s wishes. Still.… Perhaps there was a purpose. I am not a very religious man—I am, after all, a Unitarian, and even there my attendance is erratic—but perhaps I was meant to make this trip. Eleanor Greer was an innocent; nature had not granted her those powers of discernment which other young women could rely on to keep them out of the clutches of unsavory males. There was no telling what sort of jeopardy she was in. And, being powerless and alone in this world, she would have no way of extricating herself from the situation. I could offer her help, prompted only by compassion and genuine concern for her welfare. I could approach her and say, “Eleanor, it’s me, Malcolm Blair. Are you all right? Do you want to go home?” And, if she did, I would take her back to her brother. There was a very real possibility that she would want that, that my appearance would, in fact, be her salvation.

  Stopping at a gas station, I got a Coke to wash the acrid taste from my mouth. I was beginning to feel better. I was, after all, a man with a mission. Hardships were to be endured in the pursuit of a good cause. I purchased another bottle of love bug solvent and pushed on.

  LOU

  You can’t let down your guard in this world. Not for a minute. I came out of the drugstore—I guess I was in there five minutes—and Ellie was on the sidewalk hugging this fellow.

  She saw me coming, and I guess she read the look in my eyes, because she put her hands on her hips and frowned. She was wearing a bright yellow sun dress and a Panama hat, and if she’d gone to heaven that minute Jesus himself would have caught his breath.

  “Now Lou,” she said, “This is Dr. Blair, and you can just stop thinking what you are thinking, because he is my case worker at Taylor, and I won’t have your ugly thoughts.”

  I didn’t say anything, and this Blair fellow, who was a skinny guy with a brown mustache, was mumbling how he wasn’t actually a doctor, was actually only a bachelor, and how he was there on vacation and wasn’t it a coincidence, you know, running into Miss Greer? I had rarely seen a person lie so badly. It made me uncomfortable, and I almost shouted, “Don’t!” He was wearing a suit. The temperature had to be in the eighties, but he had this brown, crumpled suit, and he was even wearing a tie, so that looking at him was painful.

  “This is Lou,” Ellie said, and he reached out his hand to shake mine. I took it.

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said, shaking his hand, which was a little like holding a dead frog.

  He was going on about what a big coincidence it was, running into Ellie, how he was just looking out the window at the shops and there she was. I hummed a tune in my head to keep from listening closely and maybe saying something before I could put the brakes on it.

  I shot Ellie a dirty look when she said we could all do something together, like go to the beach or out to dinner. She gave him Dad’s telephone number too, which he wrote down in a little black address book.

  I was steamed, and when we got back in the car, I roared out of the parking lot, ran a red light, and gave this old geezer, who was crossing the street real slow, a reason to put some spark back in his step.

  “Lou Wil
lis, there ain’t nothing to be mad about,” Ellie said.

  I didn’t listen, just hunched over that wheel and mashed the accelerator.

  “You stop that!” Ellie shouted. “You just stop!”

  I had the window rolled down, and hot wind, like a tarp flapping in a hurricane, crowded out her voice. I’ll drive as fast as I please, I thought.

  I forgot—I guess because it had not happened for some time—that Ellie has a mind of her own.

  Suddenly she screamed—my heart just stopped in the middle of a beat—and she flung her door open. I guess I was going eighty-five; I was up there somewhere where the car starts to shake, flying down this two-lane highway through weedy, scrub-pine country, cloudless and full of heat. Ellie screamed and I thought: Oh God!

  I hit the brake, and we fishtailed down the highway, and the tires squealed, and the steering wheel jerked in my hands. We turned sideways to the highway, and I saw a lot of cattle standing around a pond, still as a painting, and we seemed to lift up a little in the air, and I thought: We are gonna roll.

  The car kept going around, though. If there had been another car on that highway, we would have had to hit it. But there wasn’t, and I kept my foot slammed on the brake and we bounced up across a ditch and came to rest against a fence.

  I cut the engine and turned to Ellie. I started in, “You almost—”

  But Ellie wasn’t there. Her door was wide open, and I could see a patch of black water, a busted-up shrub, and some weeds.

  I couldn’t get the door open on my side, so I crawled out the passenger side.

  My throat was too dry to shout her name, and anyway, I guess I was afraid silence would come back at me. I couldn’t stand that.

  I scrambled back out to the road and looked down it. There wasn’t anything but flat highway and blue sky with one high, circling buzzard.

  I killed her, I thought. I fell right to my knees, like God himself had blindsided me.

  “Lou,” Ellie shouted. I turned quick, and there she was, coming out of the field behind the car.

  I ran to her and hugged her. Her cheek was bleeding. “I can’t find my hat,” she said.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. My voice rattled like loose change.

  Ellie Greer giggled, reached out and pushed my hair back off my forehead. “Did I scare you?”

  “Well, I guess you did,” I said, feeling anger come over me. “I guess—”

  Ellie didn’t wait for my lecture. She put her face up to mine, not more than three inches so I could see the truth in her eyes, and she said, “You just hush, Lou Willis. I just want you to remember this: I want you to remember that I am not riding in any old runaway speeding car.”

  I shut up. I’d forgot what Ellie was capable of.

  The engine started right up, and we got back on the highway. We didn’t say anything for awhile.

  Finally, Ellie said, “I can’t make you like Dr. Blair, but you don’t have to be rude to him.”

  “Well, it just seems fishy to me,” I said. “Him showing up out of nowhere. Maybe he’s trying to cut you out of some welfare.”

  “You are so suspicious,” Ellie said. “Dr. Blair wouldn’t do anything like that. He is a gentleman.”

  I was getting a little sick of that “gentleman” stuff. That Blair, with his sweaty suit and his slickster’s mustache, looked like the kind of a guy who would sell you a car with a busted block—and you’d deserve it if you was fool enough to believe him.

  “How do you explain him turning up?” I asked Ellie. “The world ain’t that small, you know.”

  Ellie considered this, frowning and studying the highway. “Maybe he’s going to Disney World,” she said, “same as us.”

  “Disney World is way off in Orlando. How come he’s here?”

  She folded her arms. “You said we could go to Disney World. Don’t tell me different now, Lou Willis. Don’t go telling me it is ‘way off.’”

  I can’t argue with Ellie. There’s no sense trying. I can never get a handle on her rules.

  For the next week, Ellie and me didn’t do anything but go to the beach and eat and watch videos on Dad’s VCR. You’d think a schedule like that would relax a fellow, but my stomach felt like it was full of rusty nails, and when the screen door would slam, my heart would jump under my tongue.

  I guess the truth is, I am not a man much suited for doing nothing. Working for Sloan’s wasn’t heaven, but it kept me occupied, and there was real satisfaction in fixing a thing. Old Henke, my boss, was a bastard who would have stole the pencils from a blind man’s cup, but I was mostly out on calls, so I didn’t have to see him, and if he was shaving my hours some, it wasn’t worth an ulcer. We’d get into it once a month maybe, some kind of argument, and I’d stay away from the place for a day or two. But then I’d get restless and come back—and he’d be glad to have me. He had black hair that he slicked down with grease and parted in the middle, and I’d come back in, and there he’d be, like a dog that’s rolled in a grease pit, and he’d show his false teeth and say, “Bygones will be bygones,” and he’d slap me on the back, and I’d consider spitting on his shiny wingtips, but I’d just nod my head and say, “Yeah, Henke. Whatever you say.”

  I guess I’m just a working man, and I’ll endure a lot to get on with a job.

  So on Sunday, I looked through the want ads, and I circled a few of them.

  On Monday, I dressed in a clean work shirt and jeans and told Ellie I’d be back in a couple of hours. She was watching morning cartoons and eating Cheerios so she just looked up quick and said, “Okay.” Dad was already out back working in the garden, and I went out to tell him I was going.

  “I was wondering when you was gonna think about work,” he said. “I knew you wasn’t born with a silver spoon in your mouth.” He laughed and whacked a garden glove against his overalls, raising a cloud of dust.

  I was about sick of Dad’s company. Fact is, I was beginning to understand what a good thing his running off years ago had been. Two nights ago, he had taken Ellie to a nightclub. He knew how much I was opposed to that, but he did it, bringing the subject up in a sneaky, joking way. “I am thinking of going dancing,” he had said. “Only thing is: I’m afraid some woman might take advantage of me. Sometimes I drink too much, and my judgment fails me. I was hoping you kids could come along and sort of watch out for me.”

  “Ellie ain’t going to any nightclub,” I had said, and that’s where I made my mistake, of course. Ellie heard that, and it stiffened her backbone.

  “I’ll do what I please,” she said.

  It was downhill from there, and I lost that fight. I let them go and sat home watching a video. I couldn’t tell you what it was. They came back late, in a cloud of beer fumes, and Dad had his arm around Ellie’s waist, and neither of them was too steady.

  I decided then that I’d had my limit. It was time to get a place of my own.

  Pulling out of the driveway, I saw a car parked across the street, one of those silver, Jap cars. Someone was sitting in the driver’s seat. It didn’t mean anything until I got back that afternoon—feeling pretty good because it looked like Eskimo Air Conditioning was gonna hire me—and that same Jap car was there and the same dude in sunglasses was behind the wheel.

  Of course, it took about ten seconds, now that the car had my attention, to notice the Texas plates.

  He ain’t real clever, is he? I thought.

  MALCOLM

  I am, I suppose, a stubborn person. I know my mother would not hesitate to say I am the world’s most stubborn person. It is true that when I encounter an obstacle, my resolve is strengthened rather than weakened.

  Arriving in St. Petersburg and checking into a motel, I immediately caught a cold. I think it was the air conditioning in combination with the brutal road trip that weakened my resistance and left me prey to the innumerable viruses that must, of course, lurk in motels and public restrooms.

  The morning after my arrival, I could barely crawl out of bed, and then on
ly to vomit and retire again. Later in the day, I managed to make it to the lobby where I was able to purchase a number of cold remedies and retreat again to my room.

  For three days I felt rotten: feverish, disoriented. As is often the case when I’m ill, I had dreadful doubts regarding the course of my life. This most recent adventure seemed particularly foolhardy and was perhaps a manifestation of some real mental and emotional breakdown.

  On the fourth day I was able to order something more substantial than soup, and on the fifth day I was able to go out into the sunlight and purchase a map of St. Petersburg. That afternoon I drove down the shaded street where Eleanor and Lou were staying with Lou’s father. The house number was prominently displayed on the mailbox, which was a white and grey two-story in need of a paint job. The neighborhood was, however, respectable, and I had mixed feelings about that. I suppose I had been hoping to rescue Eleanor from a ghetto.

  Finding the house was enough for that day. I was still weakened by my bout of illness, and I drove back to my motel and went to bed early, setting the alarm for seven.

  In the morning, I drove back to the house, parking several blocks up on the other side of the street. I had no experience in shadowing people, but luck was on my side. Eleanor, wearing a yellow dress that would have allowed one to find her in a crowded stadium, came out of the house almost immediately—as though she had been waiting for my arrival. She was followed by a broad-chested man in a white t-shirt and brown and green mottled swim trunks. I was too far away to make out his features, but I assumed, from the proprietary way in which he ushered Eleanor into the big maroon car, that this was Lou Willis.

  That morning they went to the beach. For the next three days, I was unable to approach Eleanor. They were either at the beach, in a restaurant, or in some store. Willis rarely left her side, and when he did, he was never gone long.