Black Elvis (14 page)

Chickens
. Three of them (one per truck?—patterns emerge only in retrospect), pierced repeatedly and strategically, garlic shoved into the holes. I pointed out the smoke that was beginning to creep from the stove burners, white wisps of it, fragrant, but just a little foul smelling too (no pun). "We'll open a window," said Martin. He and I had been hired together back in Colorado. His gig was computers, mine
PR
. On weekends we'd pick a ski area and drive to it. A former rugby player, he was well over two hundred pounds and skied in a greenish oilskin affair that came down to the knees and was more the kind of thing you'd wear trout fishing in the Highlands. He'd been married in a kilt—I'd seen the photos. "Air things out a bit." When the room started to get really smoky and our detector began to beep, someone else had the bright idea of opening the door to the hallway, too, to get a little cross-ventilation.

Seven exhausted, hungry guys
in their forties crammed into a two-bedroom suite, every inch of the floor taken up with clothes, boots, sleeping bags, mattress pads. A couple of beers, someone rolls a joint. Grocery bags arrayed on the countertop and the small kitchen table, chips and jars of supermarket-brand salsa. The other guys were married, but I still wasn't, and it was starting to feel embarrassing. The art on the walls was tasteful in an invisible way—pastels, flowers—there mostly to remind you that this was a
quality
room. Cheaper hotel, uglier art. Fly in first class and you get a free drink and a different kind of tray table, but it's still the same plane. Our window had a good view of the parking lot and a few office buildings, dark mountains looming in the distance behind them.

In the restaurant's bathroom, I attempted to put my hand through the sink, but met resistance in exactly the form one would expect. Death did not preclude pain, nor did it apparently come with any of the expected benefits—I could not pass through things, read minds, or see the future. Even the past was a little hazy. The present, this cinnamon-scented men's room, was all too real. When I was eleven, I sent away for X-ray specs, which never came. Probably better that way. At the Community Park Pool I stared at the girls in their suits, thinking
when I get those glasses
, never knowing that I had just made my first foray into victimhood and the marketplace. "Eastern Illinois State—discover your future!" So now I tried to determine whether it was just me that had died, or whether the whole bunch of us were translated. Perhaps Sherman Alexie was the one lucky member of this doomed party—Waylon Jennings opting not to take the plane at the last moment and giving his seat to the Big Bopper—and we were all of us dead. Had my dining companions, too, been in Utah? Did it matter? Maybe when it happened, you just went to Ohio, period. I checked my face in the mirror, recognized it, saw nothing particularly Native American in the features. No visible blood, either. My ribs, however, hurt with every breath.

A perfectly pleasant day of winter sport yesterday on which I did not die.
Why would I? I was forty, just turned. I was not nearly so sarcastic, the opposite, even. I rode high above those sugared cliffs and gorges, gulped distinctly western air, and thought about how certain moments can be relived. Or rather, there are places one can return to that have nothing to do with outside circumstance or chronological context. Sex. The beach. The shower. Chocolate. Listening to
Sgt. Pepper's
with your eyes closed, feet up. Floating unnaturally above the world on a metal bench, looking down through a pair of skis. I'd never been there, and yet I'd been there so many times I felt like slapping myself on the back:
Dude! Where you been? We missed you!
I thought backward from there to other ski moments. The weekend trips to A-Basin with Martin. A trip with Cleo to Vermont that proved beyond any doubt my unreasonableness, when I left her at the bottom and skied the blacks all day because it was why I had come. And yet we moved in together anyway, that next year, and she dutifully bought me calendars with mountain scenes on them every December.

And back, and back.

Dinner went as well as could be hoped, considering I was faking it all the way. Luckily, no one wanted to ask me anything specific—they seemed to respect my privacy as a Native American writer filling in for a Native American writer. Since I was a backup, it occurred to me that expectations were probably lower. Still, there was going to be the reading part of the evening, and that worried me. I asked if anyone had my book, and was surprised to discover that the blotchy boy did. Coffee had come—for my meal I'd opted for the steak, which was overcooked and sided with a baked potato jacketed in foil—along with a "special" dessert for all of us, a precarious piece of chocolate cake with a layer of something red just beneath the icing.

Lucky Sherman Alexie. He hadn't fallen off the side of some mountain.

"Do you actually know Sherman Alexie?" asked the girl. Her name, predictably, was Heather. I wondered if the rules were that everyone got to hear my thoughts.

"No, not exactly."

"I think he's wonderful. But I was so angry when I heard he wasn't coming that you know what? I called his mother."

Everyone at the table seemed to think this was hilarious. Apparently, the story was familiar to them. "How?"

"I found the number, right there on the rez, and I called. She was very nice. I just said how disappointed I was—that's all. She said she'd let him know."

I could tell how much she enjoyed saying
rez
.

"Can I see it?" I asked the boy.

"I was hoping you'd sign it." He dug into the knapsack that he'd apparently had tucked between his feet through the whole meal. "Here."

Had my parents (or I) been alive, I'd have called them. There in my hands was a hardbound book with my name on it. It was remarkable. I started to flip through, but from the leaving motions taking place around me I determined it was time to go. There
were
people I needed to call. My dentist, for instance, was expecting me on Wednesday, and that wasn't going to happen. And Cleo.

I took the pen the boy held out and wrote my name on the title page. The book seemed to be called
Zip
. I tried to figure the significance of this.
Zip
as in
pep
? As in zippo, zilch, nothing? Was it a message? I could not for the life of me (hah!) remember writing it.

They drove me to a small auditorium and I did the reading. It was easy. My book was full of stories, and I just chose one. There were about twenty people in the audience. It was a Coyote story, all about how Coyote was hanging out on a big flat rock one day, when Lizard came by to ask directions. The characters all called each other "Grandfather" and "Uncle," and I didn't understand a word of it. Things happened, characters went places, had cryptic conversations, then moved on to other places. Big winds kicked up, rains came and went, talking animals were tricked into doing things. People applauded. They took me to a motel a few miles from campus and I watched
TV
and went to bed.

After that reading, I did more, at other small colleges, driving myself to them in a tiny rental car, using a handout map of Ohio with "Thrifty" printed across the top and directions to the Columbus airport on the reverse. I read other stories from my book, but I didn't understand them any better than that first one. I began to think I'd written a very good book—like life, it had the appearance of meaning, but at the same time, the harder you worked at looking under the surface, the more the whole thing just dissolved before you. At a highway trading post, I bought myself a belt with a turquoise-inlaid buckle. I tried to decide which reservation I might be from.

Sometimes, I'd stare at those directions back to the airport and wonder if there was a simple way out for me in them. Perhaps I should ignore the itinerary—it was printed on letterhead from my publisher, Zip Books—and just head home. Except that I knew what would happen. Surely that plane would take me back to Utah, and then I'd be right back where I'd started, which is to say dead on a frozen hillside, surrounded by a chastened group of men who just the evening before had found it hilarious to have emptied an entire hotel of its guests with three chickens and some garlic.

Of course, at each successive stop, there was disappointment. Everyone had been hoping for Sherman Alexie. I got used to it. They put me up in local hotels, many of which had free
HBO
. I tried to telephone Cleo, but always got an answering machine. My name was not mentioned, and that led me to believe that time had moved on more than I knew. I ate Ibuprofen like M&M's, four every three hours, and drank as much as I felt like, despite what I'd read in the magazines about liver damage. I recognized some of the schools I visited as ones I'd written copy for. "Ohio Lutheran, where the future is now!" There was a sameness to all of them—the students in their baseball caps, the professors eager to meet me, the visiting dead writer. During question-and-answer time at the end of a reading, I'd often be asked specific things. Is Grasshopper the hero of that story, or is it Grandfather Owl? What was the significance of the sweat lodge? At first, I'd answer honestly that I did not know, but my honesty was taken for cageyness. After a while, I started answering questions with questions. What do you think? I'd say. Not all stories are linear, I'd tell them.

An unexpected bump up
to first class, where I drank Bloody Marys as quickly as the stewardess (sorry, attendant, but now you know her gender) could bring them. Thinking to myself,
You are so lucky
.

Sliding all over the interstate
trying to get myself from Utica, where we now lived, to the Syracuse airport in a blizzard, praying I wouldn't land in a ditch and miss my flight and the thing I'd been training daily at the gym for, planning my life around, to the exclusion of almost anything else. To the point where Cleo pretty much stopped talking to me at all—I mean, I was executing jump-turns in the kitchen of our tiny rental house, causing the dishes to shake in the cabinets. Turning off the radio for less distraction and leaning way forward to see through the flakes.

I ate, but I was always hungry; I drank, but I never got drunk. Steaks, chops, great huge sandwiches and desserts, martinis and margaritas and straight-up Scotch. I even took up smoking again. What did it matter? I'd lived with the woman for seven years, and now I couldn't even get her on the telephone. It occurred to me that none of this might be happening at all, that in fact I might still be lying on the snow like a broken toy.
Nice turn
.

Her father was sick, so we moved to Utica. It was a nice thing to do, I suppose. He lingered for over a year; I telecommuted. Cleo looked tired all the time, and maybe we fell out of love, or maybe we just stopped trying to tell
our
story.

Finally, at a small alternative college—there really are a lot of colleges in Ohio—a young man in a cape was assigned to show me around. He had the usual multiple facial piercings and a speech impediment from the silver ball imbedded in the center of his tongue. "Do you
know
Therman Alexie?" he asked.

"Oh, we all know each other," I said. We were headed across the main quadrangle. The buildings were of gray stone, planted two hundred years earlier by earnest Unitarians intent on civilizing the frontier. A couple of girls in oversized dresses played a lackluster game of Frisbee, both of them with cigarettes in their hands. "I want to go up there," I said, pointing to the clock tower. "I'll bet there's even a legend about it."

"Thatth right," he said. "It will thtrike thirteen—"

"The day a virgin graduates."

"How'd you know?"

"Lucky guess."

"Ith a joke, man. The women here want you to thign a contract before you hold their handth. That thing ought to thtrike thirteen every night."

I got him to take me up—he had a big key ring with keys to all the buildings. We went out on the balcony overlooking the quad. It was dark already, and nearly time to head back to my room and change for dinner. The girls had given up on their game.

"What do you write?" I asked the boy.

"Poetry, mothtly. I can't theem to tell a thtory. Fiction ith boring anyway."

"I'll bet you've got something to say. I'll bet you're really talented, but just too unusual for the world to understand your talent. You're misunderstood, aren't you, cape-boy?"

"Are you being tharcathtic?" he asked. "And if tho, how come? What did I do to you?"

"Nothing," I said. "I was just checking." And then I climbed up onto the railing and swan-dived toward the concrete below.

This fall wasn't much like the last. For one thing, it was over in a second. Just a graceful suspension, then the hard smack of the ground. No time to think, in other words, which was just as well. I didn't want to think. I didn't want to know what would happen if, for instance, I tried to ditch my responsibilities in a less dramatic way and simply steal away to the Columbus airport.

That morning I'd arisen early
, intending to leave her sleeping there, but she'd beaten me to it, and the coffee was already going downstairs. I put on my robe and clumped down to where she was sitting at the table in the predawn, knocking snow off the morning paper, which had somehow made it to our doorstep. "I'll miss you," she'd said. "Even though you're abandoning me."

And I kissed her on the top of her sleep-smelling head and didn't say anything, because I never did, but instead just began assembling my bags.

I don't know who they got to replace me.

In front of the Pompidou Center, a pretty redheaded girl with a violin case took a position about fifteen yards to my left. She wore tight jeans and a black cowboy shirt with pearly buttons, and I kept one eye on her as she took out her instrument and applied rosin to the bow in brisk, short strokes. I finished up "All Along the Watchtower," nodded to the family from Peoria who had stopped to stare at me as if I were a roadside accident, laid down my Strat, and went over.