“I’m doing okay,” I said. “I’m adjusting.”
“Are you dating anyone?” Nadine asked.
“Well …” I paused. “I guess I’m just working on myself these days.”
“That’s probably what I should be doing,” Nadine said. She put her coat back on, struggling a little but managing.
“See you,” I said as she marched down the walk. I don’t think she heard me, and as it was cold, I shut the door before she reached her car.
I looked at my watch. It was almost noon. I was glad she had left before the Lunchtime Affirmation. That’s a very loud bit, including some drum-like noises I created with a cardboard box and some harmonica sounds that I’ve really labored over. I’m still not one hundred percent pleased with it, but it’s getting there.
Looking Out For Eleanor
LOU
The gas station attendant’s name was Walter Reed, and I said I had been in a hospital with that name once, and he said, “What for?” and I said, “Malaria,” and he nodded his head as though he knew all about it. He stared past me through the window, and I turned, and we both watched Ellie get out of the car. Walter Reed squinted the way a farmer will study a perfectly clear sky, skeptical-like. Ellie does, I got to say, look too good to be true.
She was wearing faded jeans, scuffed boots, and one of my old work shirts. She was smiling as she approached us, moving with her farm-girl grace, her curly brown hair dancing like a swarm of bees. The heater on the car was out, and it had been cold last night, coming east. Now the morning sun was blazing, and if you stayed out of the wind, it was warm. Ellie always was a warm weather girl, and she’d been singing along with the radio all morning, in such high spirits that I hesitated to stop. But the gauge was reading empty, and there wasn’t any way around it.
“Your wife?” Walter Reed asked. He had his elbows on the counter. He turned and looked up at me with a sly smile—as though a good looking woman was a joke we shared.
“That’s Ellie,” I said. Then, like a fool, I said, “Don’t say anything to her. It would be best if you don’t even look at her.”
That did it, of course. “I reckon I’ll look at who I please and speak if I’ve a mind to,” he said, turning away from me. “It’s a free country.”
Then Ellie swung the screen door open and brought all her energy into the store. It wasn’t a big room, and I felt the oxygen burning out of it, and I had a vision of a lot of plastic bags full of corn chips and pretzels exploding under pressure.
“I need a Coke and a couple of Snickers,” she said to me. She was heading off down the candy aisle when Walter Reed spoke to her, to her back actually cause she had flown by him like he was invisible. He said, “Hi Ellie.”
She spun around as though he’d caught her by the shoulder.
“Excuse me?” She was still smiling. She clutched her brown leather purse against her stomach, rocked back on her heels and shot me a quick glance.
“Lou. He just said my name. I don’t know him. Honest, I don’t.”
“It’s all right.” I was speaking fast, feeling blood beat in my throat. “He don’t know the situation.”
A fool could have heard the warning in my voice, but not that gas station attendant. He opened his mouth and said, “Maybe we met somewheres and it slipped your mind, Ellie, and—”
I got scared. For a moment, I saw the truck driver again, lying in the dirt with his wide, white belly showing under the t-shirt, his arms flung out like a drunken evangelist, blood all over his throat from where the bullet had shut him up in mid-sentence.
Ellie was still smiling, but that was just because she’d forgot to stop. Her eyes told the whole story, and I figured I had about thirty seconds. I had my knife out, hooked the blade out with my thumb, and was around the counter in ten.
I caught the hair on the back of Walter Reed’s head—it was long and brown and felt dirty—and banged his forehead against the counter. His cap flew off, and he shouted something. He tried to turn, and I gave him a quick cut on his cheek just to show I was sincere and said, “Don’t move at all,” and he stiffened like a bird dog on point. I looked up and shouted at Ellie. “It’s all right,” I shouted. “This is under control, here. This ain’t no big deal.”
Ellie just stood there.
Walter Reed was one of those skinny guys that surprise you with their strength, and he made a sudden turn—like a trout that comes alive in your hands—and threw me back against the soda machine and scrambled for something under the counter. I ducked low and when he turned with the gun I head-butted him in the gut and that was the fight; he folded. Like a lot of skinny guys, he had a weak stomach.
I grabbed up the revolver and stuffed it in the pocket of my windbreaker, snapped the knife shut, and said, without looking behind me, “Get on in the car, Ellie.”
Ellie turned and ran out the door. Walter Reed was moaning now. He’d rolled over on his stomach and got up on his knees.
“Look,” I said, “It’s too bad. I told you not to say anything. I’m looking out for her, see. It’s a complicated business …” My words just ran out, and I thought: I ain’t gonna explain it—not to this Walter Reed fellow and not to the cops he’s gonna call as soon as I’m out of here.
So I took the revolver out and shot him behind the ear. I just felt sick, doing it, but I took a few deep breaths, braced against the counter, and said, out loud, “It’s a cold, old world, Lou.” I put the gun back in my pocket and emptied the register. I’m no thief, but the money wasn’t doing Walter any good.
I went back to the car. Ellie was sitting on the passenger’s side, staring straight ahead.
“Look,” I said, “I got you them Snickers. And a Coke.”
She smiled like the sun coming up on the Fourth of July. It done me good, that smile.
MALCOLM
I don’t like to lecture, and I was somewhat dismayed to hear the note of admonishment that entered my voice when Mrs. Hamilton said, “You’re sweet on that Eleanor Greer.”
Mrs. Hamilton has been working for Taylor County Department of Social Services for thirty-two years, almost as long as I have been alive, and time has eroded—assuming, of course, that such ever existed—her professional bearing. She treats her clients as though they were errant children, insists on calling them by their first names, fills out their forms for them, and gives them advice for circumventing policies that she dismisses as being “bureaucratic bullshit.” She seems to understand nothing of the boundaries that are required of a social worker.
I have been with the agency seven years myself, and I see quite clearly what has happened to Mrs. Hamilton: She has “gone native.” She has chosen, it seems to me, to abandon her professional ethics for a kind of chumminess, a camaraderie with the disenfranchised. Perhaps she has despaired, and this is the result. I suppose it may happen to me with time. But it hasn’t happened yet. I still believe in conducting myself in a professional manner and in maintaining the proper distance in my dealings with clients.
I wear a suit, and I don’t, like Bradford or Daugherty, loosen my tie, roll up my sleeves, and affect a harried, hungover air. I strive for a well-groomed, neat appearance, despite the failings of municipal air conditioning during the long Texas summers.
“I can tell you are sweet on that Eleanor Greer,” Mrs. Hamilton said.
“Mrs. Hamilton,” I replied, “I am not sweet on Eleanor Greer. Miss Greer is a client, a recipient of our services, and my interest in her is one of professional concern. I realize that you are speaking in jest, but I find the suggestion insulting. Not only is Miss Greer in need of financial help, she is also, as you know, developmentally disabled. To suggest that I would harbor romantic feelings for a woman who is, mentally and emotionally, a child is to suggest that I am a child molester.”
I had overstated the case, of course. Eleanor didn’t score high on intelligence tests, and her emotional responses were not always in context, but she was not impaired in any clinical sense. Mrs. Hamilton was,
in any event, undaunted.
“She doesn’t look too developmentally deprived to me,” Mrs. Hamilton said, looking at me over the tops of her glasses. Mrs. Hamilton often resembled a dissolute Einstein, had that great scientist gained fifty pounds and taken a fancy to wearing polka-dot dresses. She continued: “And I believe I have seen your eyes assessing her developments with approval. You can say what you want, Malcolm Blair, that woman turns you on. I don’t see you rushing to get coffee for Mrs. Geller or old lady Barnes when they come in here.”
I refused to respond. Silence is often the best defense.
I thought about what Mrs. Hamilton had said. I did look forward to seeing Eleanor Greer. She was a relief from the parade of petty criminals, alcoholics, schizophrenics and pathological liars that occupied most of my time.
I wasn’t “sweet” on Eleanor Greer, but Mrs. Hamilton had, inadvertently, hit on the precise word to describe Eleanor. Aside from her extraordinary beauty, which lit up the shabby office, she had an innocence that was joyously feminine, a vulnerability that made me want to go the extra mile for her. My profession is inclined to make one cynical, and I welcomed Eleanor’s visits as a soldier must welcome news of a victory during a long, grim war. She was so sweet-natured, so cheerful.
I was worried that I hadn’t heard from her in two weeks. She was living with her brother and his wife, on a farm several miles outside of town. I went to her file and found her brother’s telephone number and wrote it down. But then I changed my mind and decided a country outing would do me good.
The drive out was over an ill-repaired, narrow road through generic Texas landscape, lots of scrub pine and twisted live oaks, their waxy leaves sprayed with fly-blown light—just a long, flat, relentless vista in which prickly pear cactus dotted the land like floral acne.
I missed the turn-off, got lost, and had to ask at a roadside grocery, where a black dog came out from behind a bin of lettuce and sniffed my crotch while making a low growling noise. “Don’t mind Horace,” the obese woman behind the counter told me. She glared at the dog, who ignored her. “He knows I’ll beat him senseless iffen he bites one more customer.”
Reassured, I asked directions and was told that I had just passed Mosely (the road I sought). I bought a Milky Way—my lunch—and left.
A grey cat, anorexically thin, slid under the porch as I approached the house. I had my first twinge of misgiving. There was a good chance my visit would not be viewed with delight, and there was always, in my line of work, the possibility of violence. My co-worker Bob Daugherty had once been forced—by a drunken man brandishing a shotgun—to attempt the repair of an ancient television. Fortunately, Daugherty’s antagonist had passed out, and tragedy had been averted. But it was the sort of thing that did happen in my business, so I was having reservations when I knocked on the door.
An unshaven, gaunt man in overalls appeared. I told him who I was and asked if Eleanor Greer was in.
“She ain’t here,” he told me. His hair stuck out oddly, as though he’d just arisen from bed.
I asked if he were Eleanor’s brother Hank, and he nodded.
“Who is it?” someone shouted from behind him.
“It’s that welfare fellow,” Greer shouted back into the room. “I told him Eleanor ain’t here.”
A woman I took to be Hank Greer’s wife appeared at his shoulder. “Hey,” she said. “Ellie ain’t here.”
“Do you know when she’ll be back?”
“You got a warrant?” the woman asked. She had short, blond hair and was pretty in a pinched, anxious way.
Her husband said, “Louise, go watch your soaps.” He stepped out on the porch, pulling the door behind him before his wife could say another word. He drained the last of a beer and threw the empty can into the yard’s tall grass.
He swayed a little, standing on the porch, and I realized the man was drunk.
“Look here, counselor,” he said, turning to me, “She’s gone.”
“You don’t know where she is?”
He studied me with disgust. “Ain’t that what I just told you?” Suddenly he zipped down his fly, turned away from me, and urinated heavily into the grass. “I’m her own brother,” he said, re-zipping his fly, “and I don’t know where she is.”
He turned back to me. “Come on.” He clumped down the porch steps, and I followed him. We walked out into the backyard, past a rusting Toronado up on cinderblocks, and he stopped in front of a charred mattress lying in the weeds.
“They dragged it into the backyard, and they set it on fire. You tell me?” He rocked back on his boot heels, hands in his pockets.
We both stood looking at the burned mattress.
“Lou Willis is a crazy sonofabitch. He was crazy back in high school, and he ain’t improved since. You don’t want to go looking for Ellie, counselor. She’s bound for hell, with my old buddy, Lou Willis.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” I said.
Hank shrugged. “What’s to understand? They burned her bed and then they run off.”
I walked around the bed. It had rained since the fire, and the mattress was a sodden loaf of ashes. When I knelt down and touched it, my fingers came away black.
Hank Greer spoke behind me. He’d leaned over and the loudness of his voice startled me.
“Looking for clues, counselor?” he asked.
LOU
I’m no Vietnam vet. I don’t claim it. I got no right to it. I wasn’t there any time when I caught the fever and had to come back. I didn’t see action, and I don’t pretend I did. But I did see the jungle, and it made an impression on me. I was born in west Texas, so before I went to Vietnam, I didn’t know how green a land could be. I’d seen jungles on TV and in the movies, but TV isn’t something that happens to a person; it’s just a lot of pictures. You come from a hard, held-in place, wildness can throw you for a loop. I caught a kind of fever that wouldn’t let go—so the army gave me a medical discharge. After Nam, Texas just seemed dried up—literally. I drank gallons of water. At night I’d hear a chopper roaring overhead, on its way to the local military base, and I’d break out in a sweat. I drove into Dallas and found a greenhouse and loaded up on big, tropical plants with waxy, catcher’s mitt leaves. My mother, a thin, fierce-believing Baptist who wouldn’t have cut Jesus any slack, would come into my room and eye those plants and frown and say, “I guess you have lost your mind.” And I guess I had.
But I got by. You get used to anything. I got some training in air conditioning repair on Uncle Sam’s tab, and I started working at Sloan Air Conditioning and Heating, and I met this girl, Marlene Summers, and we got married, and we got us a house, and I guess I looked as normal as a citizen of Texas can, until I seen her in the pickup with Lenny Sawyer and then I got depressed, but I didn’t let on. I was thinking I would pull out of it. But I didn’t. Marlene asked for a divorce, and moved to Waco. And I guess that would have finished me; I guess I would have smoked myself. Why play it to the last card? But I thought I’d go see Hank—we’d been in high school together—and I done that, and he was sort of a letdown, but that’s where I met Ellie. The last time I’d seen Ellie Greer, she was just a shrimp, Hank’s skinny kid sister. I was shocked at how she’d come along—almost embarrassed, like she’d had an accident that no one talked about. She was as wild and natural as the jungle itself, and when she laughed I could hear the way the rain used to sound all silvery in the trees and I thought: Goddam but I’ve been thirsty. And didn’t even know it!
I was shaken up after the gas station business, but I calmed down once we got on the Interstate. Ellie dozed off, just closed her eyes and leaned back and was gone, easy as a child. I studied her out of the corner of my eye and thought, “Lou Willis, you keep this woman from harm.”
By the time Ellie woke up, I had thought things over. “How would you like to go to Florida?” I asked her.
“I never been,” she said, and laughed. “I don’t know about Florida.”
“We could go see
my daddy down in St. Petersburg. I ain’t seen him in years.”
“Okay,” Ellie said. “It’s okay with me. Oh keeee doah keeee.” She pushed her hair back and looked out the window. “I’m gonna get a new bathing suit for the beach.”
We got a room that night in a motel outside of Beaumont. Ellie watched some MTV where all these kids wore suits that were too big and had ratty, don’t-give-a-damn haircuts. They were pissed off about something, like maybe they’d been given the haircuts while they were passed out or something. Well, they don’t make those shows for the likes of me, and I was feeling restless. I thought of sliding out and getting a couple of quick beers in the motel’s bar, but I didn’t want to leave Ellie, and I sure wasn’t taking her into a bar where a lot of horny salesmen and truckers were sitting around getting drunk and looking for trouble.
“Ellie,” I said, “Let’s turn the TV off and get some sleep now. I want to get up early tomorrow and get moving.”
“Okay, Lou,” Ellie said, immediately turning the TV off. She’s a good girl, Ellie. I walked over, kissed her cheek, and said, “You might want to brush your teeth, honey.”
She got up and went into the bathroom. I went on over to my own bed, slid out of myjeans, and quick slipped under the sheets.
I closed my eyes, pretending sleep, and I heard Ellie cut the light switch and crawl into her own bed. She likes to sleep in the raw—it’s how she was raised—and I do what I can to keep my thoughts away from that arena. There’s no sex between Ellie and me, you understand. My job is watching over her, and that requires all my concentration. It’s a dark, hungry world, in case you ain’t noticed.
MALCOLM
I believe that modern psychological thought doesn’t give boredom the motivational weight it deserves. I think that the answer to a lot of human behavior is, quite simply, boredom. Boredom drives people to bad marriages, and theft, and treachery and violence. I see it every day.
I think boredom explains my own actions following my visit with Hank Greer.
The Return of Count Electric & Other Stories Page 8