The Return of Count Electric & Other Stories

by William Browning Spencer

  The time was ripe for me to make my move. He who hesitates is lost, et cetera.

  The huge living room of the Colson mansion was decorated for the holidays. Colored balloons filled with helium covered the ceiling. A live rock band negotiated the current hits with some competence and a mass of brightly colored humanity danced and drank and declared their individual identities with loud speeches or simple hoots and shouts.

  I spotted Sadie wearing a red outfit that lodged somewhere between elaborate fashion and an elf costume. A very short skirt displayed legs that might have been too Rubenesque for some tastes, but they seemed wildly beneficent to me. Accosted by so much flesh, I felt incapable of asking Sadie for a date. She was so blatantly sexual that asking her to attend a movie with me would—to anyone within hearing—sound like the crudest of propositions. That is how I saw it. Youth is acutely self-aware.

  Sadie hugged me. I could smell a sweet, red scent of alcohol on her breath. It occurred to me that I could use a drink myself. I found the punch and returned to Sadie’s side. Not surprisingly, several other males had chosen to locate themselves near her. Among these was the despised Davidson, who was holding the hand of a skinny girl with dull brown hair.

  Davidson, who was looking ill at ease, saw me and smiled. Since I sat next to him at work, he saw me as a familiar face, even a comrade. It is a sad commentary on my reserve that I had never been able to convey to him how strongly I loathed him.

  “Alec,” he said, “this is my fiancée, Dorothy Cooms.”

  I took the limp and boneless hand of Miss Cooms, which was proffered in the manner of a socialite presenting a check to a welfare case.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. She wore thick, tortoise-shell glasses and her hair was as limp as her handshake.

  “We really should be going,” Miss Cooms told Davidson.

  “It’s New Year’s Eve,” Davidson said. “We should at least stay until midnight. That’s the purpose of these things, you know.”

  Just then Sadie grabbed Davidson and kissed him. “Yipes!” she shouted. “Fucking mistletoe.”

  Miss Cooms glared at Sadie. Sadie rushed about hugging other men. Suddenly Miss Cooms turned and marched away. Davidson started to follow her, then stopped. I watched his face shift under the weight of some resolve.

  I did not leave the party until two in the morning and finally managed, just before leaving, to find Sadie alone. I had seen her head toward the bathroom and had waited in the hall for her return.

  My courage reinforced by alcohol, I asked her if she would like to go to a movie sometime.

  She smiled, seemed slightly surprised, but quickly recovered. She reached forward and pushed my hair out of my eyes. “Sure,” she said. “I’d love to, Alec.”

  I left the party feeling wonderful, and I lay in bed in my apartment and said to the ceiling, “Sure. I’d love to, Alec.” Like all shy people, it took little to excite me, and this seemed an extraordinary circumstance. I would savor these good feelings before actually asking her out. Being a pessimist, I assumed that a day would come when she would cease to like me, and I wanted to prolong this period of happiness and anticipation.

  The period of bliss was even shorter than I anticipated. I awoke New Year’s Day with the beginning of a bad cold. My throat ached and I felt feverish. I stayed in bed, feeling worse as the day progressed. Outside, snow fell steadily, large wet flakes that choked the window panes and rounded the world.

  At noon the phone rang. A woman’s voice asked to speak to Alfred Davidson.

  “I’m sorry, he’s not here,” I said. “Who is this?”

  The pause went on for so long that I thought the phone had gone dead, then: “This is Dorothy Cooms. Is this Alec Macphail?”

  I admitted that that was indeed who she was talking to and that no, I hadn’t seen her fiancé. She said this was very odd.

  She said that she had left the party early. Davidson lived with his parents and didn’t have a car. Miss Cooms had driven them to the party in her car, and when she had decided to leave early she had been unable to convince him to leave. “He wanted to see the New Year in, despite the pagan nature of such rituals,” she said. So she left him, assuming he could secure a ride home from some fellow reveler.

  This morning, repentant, Miss Cooms had called Davidson’s house only to be told by Davidson’s mother that the early morning snowstorm had taken everyone by surprise and that her son had called from the party to say he was staying the night at a friend’s apartment rather than negotiate treacherous roads.

  Dorothy Cooms had found my home number in the employee’s handbook and thought I might be the referred-to friend. I said that I was not. She asked if I could suggest anyone. I couldn’t.

  My cold progressed, and I called in sick the following day. I lay in bed reading the Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian books and ministering to myself with aspirin, ginger ale, and chicken soup. I thought about Alfred Davidson and where he had been when he had not returned to his parents’ home. My thoughts led dismally to Sadie Thompson, whose apartment was somewhere in Alexandria and whose roommate was—if I remembered correctly—away visiting her parents in Tampa, Florida.

  The afternoon of my first day back at work, I encountered Davidson in the restroom. He confirmed my worst fears. “I’ve got to talk to someone,” he said, clutching me as though he were drowning.

  I said nothing, but regarded him through narrowed eyes. He was disheveled and red-eyed and his long, bony fingers dug into my arms with obscene strength.

  “I lied to Dorothy. I know she called you …” His voice trickled away. And then, suddenly, he wailed, a ghastly sound that bounced off the cinderblock walls and echoed through the stalls.

  “I’m a sinner!” he shouted. “I am a miserable, lost sinner! I have given in to lust and temptation. No, I have sought it out. I have wallowed in it and rejoiced in my depravity. Sin. Blackest sin! I am a miserable sinner.”

  He was beginning to repeat himself, and I felt overwhelmed with disgust. Tears were streaming down his cheeks, and his whole countenance seemed to be losing definition, melting.

  I shoved him away from me and he bounced against the wall. He slid slowly down the wall and into a sitting position, still sobbing. I turned and walked out of the restroom.

  Sadie seemed much the same that day, as untouched as ever. I watched her flirt with old man Rainey, and a smooth, cold anger filled me.

  Davidson did not return to his desk. Mr. Horn came by and said that Davidson had gone home ill and would I mind checking to see if there was anything pressing on his desk?

  Later Sadie stopped at my desk. “What about that movie?” she said.

  I didn’t say anything. I was thinking of her locked in Davidson’s clammy embrace.

  “Hello in there,” Sadie said, leaning forward. Her hair brushed my face.

  “When are you going to take me to that movie?” she asked.

  “Perhaps Davidson should take you,” I said. The words surprised me but I didn’t take them back.

  Sadie pulled away from me and regarded me coolly. “Oh yeah. Me and Davidson. Fucking speed-of-light gossip. Keep me posted, Alec.”

  She turned and marched away. She was fiercely seductive in her retreat. I yearned to apologize but my self-righteousness would not allow it. The other men had been different. It was her taste I now despised.

  When I arrived home that evening, I found Davidson waiting outside my apartment, hugging himself in the cold, flapping his arms like an earthbound crow.

  I walked past him and unlocked my door.

  “I’ve got to talk to you,” he said.

  I let him come inside. He sat down on the sofa and put his face in his hands. Without looking up, he said, “It would be a Christian thing to help me. You could tell Dorothy that I stayed here.”

  “I already told her you weren’t here,” I said, going to the refrigerator and getting a beer. I didn’t offer Davidson one. I assumed he didn’t drink—his principles would forbid it.
Anyway, I didn’t want to do anything to prolong his visit.

  Davidson lifted his face from his hands. “It was the drink that made me do it. I drank some of the punch. I pretended I didn’t know it was alcoholic. I knew of course. And when Sadie said I could stay at her place, I accepted, knowing I would … I would … I was aware of her reputation.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” I said.

  Davidson stood up. “I kissed her. But it was the inflamed lust of alcohol. I would have … I’ll say it … I would have thrust my tongue in her mouth had she not prevented me.” Here Davidson sank back onto the sofa, moaning. “Sinner. Gosh darned no good black-hearted sinner! Dorothy will kill me.”

  I stood there blinking at Davidson as he rocked on the sofa, sobbing and going on about sin and damnation.

  “Are you saying all you did was kiss her?”

  Davidson rocked on, sobbing.

  I reached down and shook him. He looked up. Again, his face was blurred, his eyes red. “Sinner,” he sobbed. “Oh I would have done more had she let me. There were no limits, no shame to my lust.”

  I have never felt a rage come over me like the one that came over me at the moment. Much of my anger was, I realize now, self-disgust. I began to hit Davidson. He slid off the sofa and I began to kick him. He stumbled to the door. “You son of a bitch!” I was shouting.

  “You don’t know what sin is!” I screamed (which, even at the time, seemed the words of some third party shouted over my shoulder).

  I suppose my usual reserve had abandoned me. I watched Davidson run down the sidewalk, slip, pick himself up and start running again. I prayed he would fall and break his neck.

  The next day I tried to apologize to Sadie. I waited for her break and then asked her if she would come out in the hall.

  “No thanks,” she said.

  “Please. I’ve got to talk to you.”

  Grudgingly, she agreed. “Let’s hear it.”

  I realized then that I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Yeah? For what?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, for what I said. I mean … about Davidson and you …”

  Sadie leaned toward me. She never had much fear of invading another’s space. She placed a palm flat on my chest. “You’re a fucking Shakespeare with the fucking words,” she said. “I know what you thought. Me and the Reverend Davidson banging ourselves blue … that’s what you thought, huh?”

  Again, I could do nothing but look stupid and remorseful. Words eluded me.

  “Well, I’ll tell you something,” Sadie said, in what were to be the last words she ever spoke to me, “I don’t have too fucking high an opinion of you either, Alec Macphail. In fact, I think you are a fucking pig. That’s “P” fucking “I” fucking “G.”

  “I can understand that,” I said.

  In the interests of literary conservation, a number of the characters in the above story have been recycled from Somerset Maugham’s classic “Rain.” We live on a small planet, and it is time we stopped the profligate creation of new characters and used the perfectly viable ones that already exist.

  —The Author

  A Child’s Christmas In Florida

  The week before Christmas, Luke Haliday killed the traditional mud turtle, gutted it, and gave its shell to his oldest son, Hark. Hark painted the shell with day-glo colors and wore it on his head, where it would remain until two days before Christmas when the youngest of the children, Lou Belle, would snatch it from his head, run giggling down to the creek, and fill the gaudy shell with round, smooth stones.

  “I miss Harrisburg,” Janice Mosely said to her husband. “It should be cold at Christmas. There should be snow.” Her husband didn’t say anything, but simply leaned over his newspaper like he might dive into it. Well, Al could ignore her if he pleased. She knew he missed Pennsylvania too and just didn’t care to talk about it. There was no getting around it: Christmas was for colder climes, everyone all bundled up and hustling from house to house with presents, red-faced children, loud, wet people in the hall peeling off layers of clothing, scarves, boots, gloves, shouting because they were full of hot life that winter had failed to freeze and ready for any marvelous thing. And snow, snow could make the world look like the cellophane had just been shucked from it, was still crackling in the air.

  “Barbara says it snowed eight inches last week,” Janice said. Barbara was their daughter. Al Mosely looked up from his newspaper and regarded his wife with pale, sleepy blue eyes. A wispy cloud of gray hair bloomed over his high forehead, giving his face a truculent, just-wakened cast. In fact, he had been up since five (his unvarying routine) and regarded his wife’s nine o’clock appearance at the breakfast table as something approaching decadence.

  “She’ll have to get that dodger”—Al always referred to Barbara’s live-in boyfriend as “that dodger,” an allusion to the young man’s ability to avoid matrimony—“She’ll have to get that dodger to shovel her walk this year,” Al said. “She was the one who was so hot for us to retire to Florida, and we done it and we’ll just see if she gets that layabout to do anything more than wait for the spring thaw.”

  “Oh Al,” Janice said, waving a hand at him and turning away. She walked into the living room and stared out the window. Not only had they moved to Florida, they had moved to rural Florida, land of cows and scrub pines and cattle egrets. Her husband had said, “Okay, I’ll go to Florida, but not to some condominium on the ocean. I don’t want a place full of old folks playing bridge and shuffleboard. If I’m gonna retire, I’m gonna retire right. A little place in the country—that’s the ticket.”

  Janice watched a yellow dog walk out into the road. Its image shimmered in the heat, like a bad television transmission. Christmas. Christmas in Loomis, Florida. Dear God. Why, none of her neighbors had even put up lights. And maybe they had the right idea. Why bother? There was no way this flat, sandy place could cobble up a Christmas to fool a half-wit.

  As Janice Mosely stared out the window, three boys, the tallest of them wearing a funny, brightly colored beanie, marched by. A tiny little girl ran in their wake. The boys were carrying a Christmas tree. With an air of triumphant high spirits, they wrestled it down the road, shouting to each other, country boys in tattered jeans and t-shirts and home-cropped haircuts, boys full of reckless enthusiasm and native rudeness. Janice smiled and scolded herself. “Well, it’s a perfectly fine Christmas for some, Mrs. Janice ‘Scrooge’ Mosely,” she said out loud. Still smiling, she turned away from the window and walked back into the kitchen. Her husband was listening to the radio, the news, all of it bleak: war, famine, murder, political graft.

  “What’s the world coming to?” Janice asked her husband.

  “Let me think about it before I answer,” Al said.

  Hark was the oldest boy, but he wasn’t right in the head, so Danny, who was three years younger, was in charge. “You don’t do it that way,” Danny said. “You will just bust your fingers doing it that way. Boy, you are a rattlebrain.”

  “Shut up,” Hark said. “If you know what’s good for you, shut up.”

  “What’s the problem here?” their father asked, coming into the backyard. Luke Haliday was a tall, lanky man with a bristly black mustache. There wasn’t any nonsense in him and his children knew it. He had been very strict since their mother left. Now he said, “Maybe you would rather fight than have a Christmas?”

  “No, no!” shouted little Lou Belle who was so infused with the spirit of Christmas that it made her eyes bulge. The boys, Hark, Danny, and Calder, all shouted: “No, no.”

  “I was just trying to explain to Hark that you got to tie these traps onto the tree first and then set em. You do it the other way, you just catch all your fingers,” Danny said.

  Luke laid a hand on Hark’s shoulder. “Is this the first tree you ever decorated?” he asked his son.

  “No sir,” Hark said.

  “Well then,” Luke said.

  “Tie em, then
set em,” Hark said, kicking dirt.

  Luke stood back from his children and regarded the Christmas tree; the boys had dug a hole for the trunk and braced it with wires and stakes. The tree stood straight, tall and proud, the field rolling out behind it. “That’s a damned fine tree,” Luke said. “You children got an eye for a tree. You take this one out of Griper’s field?”

  “Yes sir,” Danny said.

  “It’s a good one,” their father said. He reached down, picked up one of the mousetraps, and tied it to a branch with a piece of brown string. Then he set the trap and stood back again. The tree already had a dozen traps tied to various branches. “If a tree like this can’t bring us luck then we might as well give up. We might as well lie down and let them skin us and salt us if a tree like this don’t bode a fine Christmas.”

  The children agreed.

  Their father turned and walked back to the shack, and the children set to work tying the remaining traps to branches. Later they would paint colored dots on them. “I want blue,” Lou Belle insisted. “I want mine blue.” Her voice was shrill, prepared for an argument, but Danny just said, “Sure. Why not?”

  “Hello,” Janice shouted, when she saw the little girl again. “Hello, little girl.” The child turned and stared at Janice for a long time before finally changing course and toddling toward the old woman.

  “Lou Belle,” the little girl said in answer to Janice’s question. What a sweet child, Janice thought, with such full cheeks—they cried out to be pinched—and those glorious, big brown eyes. The girl wore corduroy overalls and a white t-shirt. Her feet were bare.

  “What’s Santa bringing you for Christmas?” Janice asked.

  The girl shrugged her shoulders. “Santa don’t come to our house,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m sure he does.” Janice knelt down and placed her hands on the child’s shoulders. Lou Belle was a frail little thing. “Santa wouldn’t miss a sweet little girl like you.”

  “Yes’m,” the girl said. “He don’t come anymore. He left. He and my mommy. They went to live in sin.”

  “Goodness,” Janice said. What an odd child.