Last Ride to Graceland (10 page)

PART THREE

Fairhope, Alabama

CORY

June 1, 2015

I
'm proud to be a southerner, which isn't always a fashionable thing to say. Proud to be an American too, which is even less fashionable. I'm not talking about politics or money or history or about who did what to whom and when or why. I'm just talking about the feeling you get when you're heading west and the road is unfolding before you, like a gas station map. I'm talking about how it feels to get in a car and just ride.

Southern states are big. It's not like New England or the Atlantic Seaboard, places I worked earlier in my career, during that brief expanse of time when country music was so cool that all a girl had to do was stretch out her accent to get Yankee gigs. But when you're driving up north there's the constant illusion of progress, with Connecticut turning into Rhode Island and then here comes Massachusetts before you can hardly blink. But in the South, it's like you're traveling the same piece of land, over and over. The open space can hypnotize you.

I'm drifting through Georgia, weaving my way toward Ala
bama, and there's no evidence in the trash bag as to how Honey might have navigated this particular stretch of the trip. I spend most of the morning on the back roads, the two-laners. Every now and then the road swells, becomes somewhat wider, so that you can let the car that's been on your bumper for the last twenty minutes finally pass. Or maybe you're the one who swings out and accelerates, swooping around a tractor or the occasional logging truck. It's all real civilized and polite, like you're constantly opening the door for a succession of strangers. You go first. No really, you. I insist. Lucy and I stop in a little dollhouse of a town called Madison for lunch, then walk to stretch our legs. And it's during this stroll around the square that I do the math in my head and am forced to conclude that all this sweet meandering is costing me two extra hours in transit and at least one extra tank of gas.

After that it's back to the interstate, which provides mental entertainment of a completely different type. Reading the billboards is practically like having a conversation. I learn, for example, that La Quinta is a pet-friendly chain. This is welcome news, since we're going to have to find a place to stop for the night. Of course, saying that La Quinta is pet-friendly is no guarantee they'll be thrilled to welcome this particular pet, who sits up and howls at periodical intervals, for reasons I can't begin to guess. I furthermore suspect Lucy's going to be a bedspread chewer and curtain yanker. I'm basing this on the fact that sometime during the long trance of Georgia, he bit my guitar strap clean in half.

I've been singing as I drive and I've found myself building on the snippet of the song from the tape. The problem with the
first line is that Elvis ended with the word
water
. A rookie mistake. Hardly anything rhymes with
water,
so I move the words around until the two opening lines end with
pier
and
down,
both excellent songwriting choices, words that open up a world of rhyming possibilities.

I like to compose while I'm driving, so it hasn't particularly bothered me that in this age of satellites and sound systems my radio and busted eight-track player are useless. In fact, the longer I drive, the less it bothers me that I don't even have a phone. Nobody's likely to be calling and it's even less likely that anybody would call with any news I'd want to hear. Gerry would only be screaming about how I've left him in the lurch on Memorial Day weekend and Bradley might want to know if I've shipped his waders yet. I haven't, although I should, especially in light of the fact that with any luck, I'll be spending tonight in some perfectly civilized interstate La Quinta, and will thus no longer have to use the boots as an anti-rape device.

“We need to find a post office,” I tell Lucy. “Bradley doesn't ask anything of me, so it seems I should at least be able to do this one tiny thing. Especially considering I'm his only child.”

Lucy climbs from the back to the passenger seat as if he knows I need to talk.

“I don't know why I'm an only child,” I tell him. “Laura and Bradley were the kind of people who could've handled a bucketload of kids, so I don't know why they stopped with just me. It's not like I'm any prize.”

The dog whinnies, seems to nod.

“You don't have to be so quick to agree. But it is weird. They were twenty when I was born, which is young to have a baby,
but even younger to stop having babies. I mean, Laura was obviously fertile and Bradley obviously liked being a dad. He spent every weekend volunteering for the athletic association and the band boosters. You're thinking there was some problem, probably on his side of the bed. I wonder if they got tested.”

Lucy tilts his head, considering the issue.

“You're right,” I say. “They wouldn't have bothered testing Laura, but if they tested Bradley and he came back sterile . . . Can you imagine what an awkward day that would have been? Proof beyond measure that I really wasn't his child, and I don't know if that ever happened, but if it did, Bradley's even more of a saint than I ever thought. Because he never treated me one bit different than a man would treat his blood daughter. Hell, he was better than 99 percent of the daddies out there. You'd like Bradley. He'd like you. He likes dogs. Dogs and kids.”

Lucy looks at me out of the corner of his eye.

“Exactly. He deserves a lot better than me in his declining years, and the fact that I'm all he's got is proof there's no justice in this world. We gotta find ourselves a small town and a small-town post office and send him his boots.”

An exit is coming up, but it doesn't say anything about a town. It just promises strippers and Jesus, two things that Alabama seems to offer in endless supply. A few miles back I passed a billboard with Jesus holding out his arms and asking, “Are you lonely?” and then right above it was a bunch of pouty-lipped girls saying, “This is all you need to know.” Or maybe it was the other way around and the strippers are there to comfort the lonely and Jesus is all you need to know. It hardly matters. Last night's sleep was brief and shallow, so I'm starting to get careless. Each time I
look down I see I'm driving too fast. Fifteen miles over the speed limit, when anybody but a fool knows only ten is prudent. It's like the Blackhawk is taking charge, like if I leave it alone it'll bird-dog its way back to Memphis on its own. Meanwhile every exit I pass has chain hotels and fast food and strip clubs and churches, but none of them says a damn thing about the US Postal Service.

“Here's the thing,” I say to Lucy. “Now that I've had some time to ponder it, the notion of mailing Bradley his waders raises a different issue. Will the post office let me ship a great big package COD to Clearwater without a return address? Hell, I don't even have a box and it'll take a coffin to ship these waders. You've seen them. I don't want Bradley to know where I am or what I'm doing, and there's already a good chance he might put it together. He sent me out to Polawana, after all, and if he calls Bruiser's again and Gerry tells him I've taken off without explanation . . . then getting a pair of waders sent from Bumfuck, Alabama, will only cinch the deal.”

Lucy yawns.

“No,” I say, “you're wrong. Bradley's nice, but he's not stupid.”

So maybe the waders will just have to come with me a little longer after all, at least until I hit the Gulf of Mexico and it's too late for anyone to try and stop me. Tonight I will find a clean, safe, ordinary La Quinta, one that looks just like a thousand other La Quintas and has a clean bathroom and a decent bed. A hot shower and good night's sleep can solve just about everything.

“That Philip guy back in Macon,” I say to Lucy. “That politician. He knew my mama. He knew her just fine and you can tell by looking that he wouldn't have hesitated to despoil her. He's one of those guys who shoots first and asks questions later.
I know that kind. I just never knew my mama knew that kind, you know?” I glance down at the $268, which I've moved to the cup holder to accommodate Lucy.

“And you know why he gave me this money, don't you?” I say to Lucy, even though he's lost interest in the conversation and is almost asleep. “He thinks he's my daddy. I mean, he isn't. He can't be. The math doesn't work.”

According to the stories they always told me, Laura got back to Beaufort in the heat of a Friday afternoon. She showed up while Bradley was having lunch and he swung her round and round under a cypress tree. They got married the very next day. Bradley wanted to invite the whole town, but Laura said no, let's keep it small. Her daddy did the service, her mama was on the organ, his parents were the only witnesses. There was no time to shop so Laura wore her prom dress, which just happened to be white. In the pictures, Mama looked terrified and Bradley was grinning ear to ear.

Saturday, August 20, 1977. The date of their anniversary is stuck in my head because I'm always counting forward from it. Counting forward to my birthday on February 24, and February's such a short month and I was born so close to the end that I've always wondered why Mama couldn't hang on just a few days longer, until March, when I wouldn't have been quite so obviously a bastard and she wouldn't have been quite so obviously a knocked-up girl in a white prom dress. But that's all water over the dam now, and the point is that I was always counting forward but never counting back. Counting back is giving me a whole new kind of mystery to ponder.

“If I was born in February, Mama must have gotten preg
nant at the very beginning of the summer.” I continue, ignoring Lucy's snores. “And she wasn't anywhere close to Macon, Georgia, in the summer of '77. I looked up the schedule online years ago and they wrapped up their touring in April, and that's too early. She was living at Graceland when she got pregnant, and there's no way around it.”

I guess Philip didn't have time to do all that figuring. He just knew that the daughter of a girl he once slept with showed up on his doorstep asking questions and figured it was worth four hundred dollars to move her on down the road. But it's odd that we both were at the Juicy Lucy on this particular morning, and that he didn't even seem all that surprised to see me sleeping in his parking lot. It was almost like he knew I was coming.

“But that doesn't make any sense either,” I say, still talking out loud even though I know Lucy's asleep. “I didn't know I was coming until day before yesterday, so there's no way anybody could have called and warned him. I'm just getting paranoid. It comes from spending too much time in this car alone.”

And so I go back to playing the alphabet game, counting out-of-state license plates, and singing song lyrics in my head. Anything to distract myself, but my mind keeps drifting back to the way Philip peeled the bills off that wad of money, twenty after twenty. Real calm and methodical, like he always knew this day would come. Like he was paying off a debt that had accumulated interest over a long stretch of time.

A night
spent in the Montgomery La Quinta has me feeling like myself again. The next morning, I put the three hours to Mobile
behind me without any problem, and take the Fairhope exit, which throws me onto the same sort of swampy connectors that I'm used to from home. One bridge after another and clumps of reeds and circling gulls and a dead deer barely knocked off the pavement. It's impossible to make good time on roads like this. I take it slow and easy, but even so, I figure that by noon I'll be eating lunch at Doozy's Barbecue. Just like my mama did thirty-seven years ago. Fairhope was her pivotal stop. I feel it in my bones.

I pass a little white cinder-block building that proclaims itself to be the post office, town hall, library, recycling center, and DMV for a town called Wild Acre, Alabama. There wasn't much of an indication I'd entered any town at all, save for the fact the speed limit dropped from forty-five to thirty-five a couple minutes back. Since I got off I-10, I've been watching the signs like a hawk. The Blackhawk is such a noteworthy car that it's a miracle I've gotten this far without falling into the clutches of the law, and the last thing I need is to get pulled over by some Wild Acre cop.

I do a U-ey and turn back. The parking area is rutted, with maybe a handful of gravel scattered through the whole lot, and I bounce my way around to the back of the building. Lucy, sensing a shift in the energy of the vehicle, has already climbed into my lap. I'm snapping the leash on him when I notice a second cinder-block building, identical in size and shape to the first. Except this one has a hand-painted sign saying
EDDIE'S
followed by the words:
WE FIX EVERYTHING
.

Well that's quite a claim. Nobody can fix everything, but I nonetheless grab the busted eight-track tape and pick my way through the mud to the screen door, keeping Lucy in a choke hold as I enter.

Eddie turns out to be a black guy, about five decades younger than I would have guessed. Younger than me, which it seems more and more people are these days, and he's watching a ball game on a thirteen-inch TV with rabbit ears, which is balanced on a bar stool. He looks up as I enter and frowns at the dog.

“Define everything,” I say.

“That dog doesn't bite, does it?”

“I've never known him to bite,” I say, leaving out the part about how I've only had the dog in my possession for twenty-­four hours and that during that time he did indeed make a lunge at the desk clerk of the Montgomery La Quinta.

“I got bit when I was a kid,” Eddie says, getting to his feet almost apologetically as I slide the eight-track across the counter.

“This is a tape,” I say, echoing Bradley's oft-stated claim that a person can never go wrong by stating the obvious. “I put it in an eight-track player and the player chewed it up. Anything you could salvage would be a gift.”