Last Ride to Graceland (15 page)

“Thank you for giving me the hammock.”

“Loaning it, not giving it.”

“Understood.”

“Should be a good night to sleep out,” she goes on, a statement that is beyond argument. The evening air feels like velvet and stars are beginning to peek out, enough coming early to promise a canopy within the hour, and the sound of the water has me drowsy already, along with the beer. “I'll put the dog in the back bedroom with me.”

“Are you sure? Lucy doesn't seem like the kind of dog you bring inside.”

“Don't seem like the kind of dog you leave outside either. He might leap off the deck in the night and then what would we have?”

“A hanged dog.”

“I don't think either one of us wants to wake up to a hanged dog.”

“I'll take him down the beach and walk him one last time,” I say. “But first I've got to ask you . . . could Mama have been with somebody else from the tour? Like Fred?”

Marilee chuckles, genuinely amused. “Fred was a thousand years old even back then. He must be two thousand now. You say he's still at Graceland?”

“He said he was some sort of historian. He's got a fancy title.”

“When you get there, make him pay.”

“Excuse me?”

“For the Blackhawk. Before you hand over the keys, make Fred pay you for it. Elvis gave that car to Honey free and clear and that makes it your inheritance.”

The thought of demanding payment for the Blackhawk never occurred to me, which I guess is proof I really am a silly fool. “The whole time I've been driving, I keep thinking that if the cops catch me, I'm fucked.”

“Don't talk like that. Your mama wouldn't like it. Besides, you found that car on family property and possession is nine-tenths of the law. So you make them pay you good.” Marilee sits back with a deep, closing-time sigh. “You owe Honey that much, at least.”

As I
was crawling into the hammock that night I started thinking about the time my mama tried to teach me how to sing.

Or maybe I should say the time she tried to teach me how to sing like her, because music was always in our house and I learned it natural as breathing. I could pick out chords on a guitar before I could pick out words on a page. But I had a lower natural pitch than Mama, a narrower range. Whenever I'd sing along with the radio I always came in just a little under the melody and I liked that about myself. I thought it gave me distinction, made me more salt than sugar. I wanted edge. A sort of Delta-dirty, bourbon-soaked sound.

I guess all I'm saying is, I didn't want to sound like my mother.

Oh, she was the better musician, no doubt about it. You can't spend a lifetime singing backup and leading church choir and
teaching piano to tone-deaf children without knowing everything there is to know about how a song works. She was the one who had thought and studied, who'd broken it all down and put it back together again. But I was the one who was going to be a star.

And I would have sworn she knew that too, right up to the Christmas of my last year in high school when she looked up over breakfast one morning and said just as cool as if we'd discussed it, “I've put you down for lead angel in the pageant.”

From my point of view, there were about a hundred things wrong with that statement. For starters, I was almost eighteen. Just a few months shy of the age she'd been when she took a bus to Memphis and got herself pregnant with me. So I wasn't a child, I was a breath away from being a woman fully formed. She had no right to “put me down” for anything.

Much less for lead angel. Lord. The lead angel closes out the pageant with “Ave Maria.”

“I don't have those notes,” I said.

She smeared jam on her toast. Smeared it hard, like she was mad, but she didn't look up at me when she answered.

“You most certainly do have those notes,” she said. “Or you could have them. Anytime you choose to claim them.”

“I don't go that high.”

“It's not that high.”

“What do you mean, it's not that high? It's ‘Ave Maria.' ”

She folded the piece of bread taco style, like she always did before shoving it into her mouth. “We'll see,” she said.

Yes, we certainly would. Mama could be as stubborn as crabgrass, but I could too. Despite what she thought, I was entirely too old to be wrapped in a bedsheet and have coat hanger-­
and-tissue-paper wings strapped to my back. Besides, singing high . . . well, I can't say exactly what I thought singing high meant. Being a good girl and going to church and keeping your legs closed and ending up disappointed with what all that virtue had bought you . . . probably something like that.

I'm older now and I've seen a lot more. I know there are worse things to wind up being than Laura Ainsworth. Lots of them. My mama's life had dignity and purpose and there were people who loved her—starting and ending with Bradley, who looked at her the way no man's ever looked at me. That's something. It's a lot.

But in the winter of 1995, all I could think was that, yeah, we'd just see about me strapping on those coat-hanger wings and being lead angel. I had worked for my lower register. The gravel in my voice was hard won and I wasn't about to give it up, not even for my last Christmas pageant.

So in the church, during the first rehearsal, I deliberately blew it. I cracked on the money note, even though it hurt my pride to see everybody else in the choir shudder.

Mama was standing in front of us, behind her podium. She had her glasses on.

“Try again,” she said.

“It's out of my range,” I said.

“Cory Beth, I'm asking you to try again.”

So I tried again and cracked again and then, an hour later, when everyone was packing up and getting the hell away from the tension in that choir loft, Mama looked at me cold as ice and said, “What do you think you're trying to do?”

It was a question that could have applied to several aspects
of my life. She and Bradley had been scraping together dimes and dollars for years, but I'd announced to them that I had no intention of going to college, or even taking the SATs. I spewed out some nonsense about a gap year, even though I think all three of us knew good and well that if I got a chance to veer off the path they had planned for me, that the detour would likely last my whole life.

“That snarling thing,” Mama said, taking off her glasses and rubbing her temples. “Going below the note. You're going to ruin your voice if you keep trying . . . trying to be what you weren't meant to be.”

She had a point. Twenty years of trying to pitch too low has wreaked havoc on my vocal cords and left me where the hoarseness that I once affected is now my natural sound. Life's like that. Full of jokes. Pretend to be whiskey and burlap for long enough and one morning you wake up to find that's what you really are. You couldn't go back if you tried.

“But maybe,” I told my mama back then, in that empty church, “my voice is more like my father's. Has anybody ever thought of that?”

Mama hesitated. She must have known I had my doubts, but I'd never raised the issue so directly.

“I've got nobody else to be lead angel,” she finally said. “You know what we have in this choir as well as I do. It's not like there's anybody else waiting in the wings.”

“Is that a joke?”

“Why would it be a joke?”

“You know, an angel . . . waiting in the wings.”

“That's not what I meant,” she said, and she pulled her
purse off the front pew and started digging around for a Goody's Powder. I felt bad. I'd given her another headache, not the first and not the last, and besides, Mama cared about those church Christmas pageants. She wanted them to be good. And for a moment I wondered, out of nowhere, what we'd be like if we weren't mother and daughter, if we were just equals and friends. I've known some girls who claimed to be friends with their mothers, even a couple who have sworn their mother was their best friend. They say it like it's something to be proud of, but it just makes me think they must not have any real friends or they'd know better than to say such a foolish thing. You can't turn milk into water.

“I'm not trying to give trouble, Mama,” I said, which was such an outrageous lie I'm surprised the cross on the wall behind me didn't come loose right that moment and fall on my head. “Honestly, I'm not trying to be stubborn. I just don't have that note. I don't have the breath.”

Mama did the last thing I expected her to do then. She smiled and let it go. “Now, my sweet girl,” she said, “you and I both know that note's on layaway for you. Somebody's been paying on it for years and you can pick it up anytime you're ready.”

That's what she said. That was my mama. The woman was always a mystery to me. Every step I ever took toward her just ended up leading me further away, and every time I tried to escape her I just wound up back in my own front yard. There's no point in pretending otherwise, at least not now, when I'm looking over Mobile Bay, lying in a hammock made out of a Mexican blanket, my beer buzz slowly setting, just like the sun. I told myself that I was taking this trip to learn who my father was,
but it's occurring to me that I'm taking it to find out who my mother was. Really was. Not just the choir director Leary remembers or the wild child Philip claimed to know or the virgin Marilee Jones sent on her way. Certainly not my best friend, although as it turns out, at least when it came to my singing voice, Mama was right.

When the time came for me to hit the high note in “Ave Maria,” I cleared it with an oceanful of breath to spare.

For the
second time in three days, I awaken with a man staring down at me. I jerk and the hammock sways, and when he extends a hand to stabilize me, I realize it's not a complete stranger. It's Eddie, the man who can fix anything.

“I've got something for you,” he says as I scramble out of the well of the hammock and onto the deck. I'm disoriented, partly from eight hours of swaying suspension and partly from yesterday's beers. My mouth feels gritty and stale. I have to pee. I need to brush my teeth and have a big mug of coffee. Then my gaze falls on Lucy's empty leash and for a moment I panic, until I remember that last night, after our walk, Marilee took the dog into the restaurant with her.

“The tape,” I say, trying to swim my way back to the here and now. “You fixed it.”

“Somewhat. A little bit. I can't promise that—”

“I know. You can't promise that the pieces are in the right order. Can you give me a minute to pull myself together? Would you like a cup of coffee?” It's not really my place to offer this kid something I may not be able to deliver, not even something as
simple as a cup of coffee, but surely Marilee has a drip pot in the kitchen somewhere.

He nods and sits and as I head inside, I parenthetically notice the bag in his hands. It's suspiciously big if all he's brought me is an eight-track, but for now I pick up my backpack and stumble in through the screen door, heading for the ladies' room. As I brush my teeth and change my T-shirt and scrub off the old sunscreen and put on some more, I can hear Marilee moving around. She's talking to someone—either Eddie or Lucy, I guess—and I'm happy to smell that she's already got coffee brewing.

Through the propped-open screen door I can see they're all out on the deck, including the dog. He likes it here. It might be kinder to leave Lucy in Fairhope, assuming Marilee will agree to take him, rather than to force him back into that cramped little backseat and haul him on the next leg of this journey to nowhere.

“Want me to wait for the coffee?” I holler out the door.

Marilee hollers back. “I think you need to come out right now and hear what this boy has to tell you.”

That doesn't sound good.

I ease my way back out and pull up the chair beside Eddie's, making everybody wince with the sound of scraping wood. He's holding a poster. One of the kind they used for outlaws in the Wild West saying “$10,000 Reward for Armless Hank the Bank Robber” or some such foolishness. I didn't even know they made posters like that anymore.

“Cop came by this morning,” Eddie says. “Asked me if I'd take this over to the post office when they open Tuesday so they
could put it on the bulletin board.”

“Oh God,” I say. “I knew this was coming. I'm a wanted woman.”

“Actually, you're a missing woman,” Eddie says, handing it over, and that is indeed the word at the top of the poster:
MISSING
, in big black letters, along with my name, age, height, and weight, or at least the height and weight I gave the DMV the last time I went in, which is somewhat accurate if I'm standing up real straight in heels and have just had two solid weeks of stomach flu.

And then there are three pictures. The first is taken from my driver's license, which of course is horrible and in some ways as big a fiction as the height and the weight, but it's kind of a relief to see that the picture looks nothing like me. It's generic. The face staring out at the world could be any middle-­aged white woman with dark hair in all of America, and God knows there are plenty of us.

As if the FBI realized this, they added two more pictures to the bottom of the poster.

These are the real problem.

One is a picture of the Blackhawk. Not only that, it has Elvis standing beside it, although someone has put a big black pixel box over his face. Which is stupid, since it's obviously Elvis, leaning against the long shiny hood of an extraordinary machine with the high columns of Graceland visible in the background, wearing one of those white jumpsuits with a shoelace closing in the front and an attached cape. Who the hell else could it be? It's either Elvis or an Elvis impersonator—those're pretty much the only two options.

And then there's a picture of Mama. Not the photo of her
and Marilee, but one very similar to it. She's dressed in full backup dancer regalia, with an explosion of jet black curls and a big smile. It's an odd thing, I guess, that someone somewhere must have thought a picture of my mother would help the cops track me down, and the even odder thing is that they're right. I guess I may as well stop saying I'm not like her, because I am and this poster proves it. I look more like my mama than I look like myself.