Last Ride to Graceland (17 page)

CORY

T
he rest of Sunday is no more than a blur. I gulp the Tylenol and force down an egg or two, then fall immediately asleep on Marilee's bed. I'm dimly aware of time passing, of clanging pans and slamming doors, and people laughing on the deck. When I finally open my eyes, the worst of the headache is gone.

Nothing's left but what Mama used to call that echo pain, a sort of low-level soreness, like something came in and stretched my head and now I'm just trying to settle it back to its previous size. I'd thrown a towel over the curtain at the window before I lay down, trying to keep the room as dark as possible, but the towel must have gradually slid out of place, because when I roll over and slowly open my eyes, a rectangle of light has broken through to the floor. It's dim. Looks like I've slept most of the day away.

My bladder is ready to burst, so I struggle to my feet and push open the door. The restaurant is empty, except for Marilee and Lucy that is. Both of them are at the same table, with Marilee sipping coffee.

“She lives,” she says.

“Where is everybody?”

“Where they should be on the morning after Memorial Day weekend. In their beds.”

It takes me a minute to put together what she's saying. “I was out for the whole day and the whole night too?”

“It's just after six, Tuesday morning. Do you feel like driving? If so, we need to get you on the road.”

“Let me brush my teeth.”

When I get out of the bathroom Marilee has my stuff packed, with the guitar balanced uneasily on top of the pile, and a tuna salad sandwich folded into a paper bag. I put the backpack on, take the bag and a cup of coffee while Marilee wrangles the guitar and Lucy. We pass the hammock on the deck, and when I thank her for sleeping outside last night and giving me her bed, she just says, “Hush.”

It's like she understands the echo pain. Maybe it's something she remembers from my mama. We walk down the pier, the beach, and up the steps without speaking. I don't even ask her where we're going. Well, I guess I sort of know that. She and Eddie must have moved the car at some point and she's taking me back to his place to claim it. Only I'm not sure how we're going to get there until finally, all three of us panting from the climb, we make it back to the landing at the top of the stairs and I see a pickup truck with
DOOZY'S BARBECUE
painted on the side.

It's a strange little hybrid world she lives in. Her business is half Doozy's and half Bay Restaurant, half pig and half fish, and she lives in the back of it and she's half a star and half a drudge.
It's rare to see anyone work the way Marilee Jones works, running the whole place. She seems to be running the whole town. I could tell by the way Eddie fell in with whatever she said that Marilee has a lot of sway in Fairhope, that getting out and coming back has earned her more respect than it ever earned Honey in Beaufort.

We climb in. Lucy sits between us. Letting a dog of his limited mental capacity ride back in a flatbed is out of the question. As she pulls from the lot into the road, Marilee is humming something, half under her breath. The melody sounds familiar and I start to ask her what it is, but then it hits me. And for once in my life I'm glad I had the sense to hush.

HONEY

S
o I hug her and say good-bye. I love Marilee, probably as good as I love anybody in this world, and I do promise, but even as I'm saying the words, I know there's no way I'm throwing out that tape. Deep down in her heart of hearts, I don't think she really expects me to. If she wants our song destroyed, let her pitch the whole thing into Mobile Bay herself.

But she doesn't. She gives it to me—along with the car, and the jar of tupelo honey, and this road map, already folded to the great state of Georgia.

I accelerate as I leave town. Dare some Alabama cop to try and stop me. Throw the tape away? Right. Like I'm going to do a fool thing like that.

This tape is all I've got left of Elvis.

Hell. It's all I've got left of me.

CORY

I
t's a relief when Eddie comes out of his shop carrying WD-40 instead of Mazola, and it belatedly occurs to me that they were kidding about the cooking oil last night. That's one of my first signs I'm getting a migraine, along with rubbing my temples. I start failing to understand when people are making a joke. Eddie climbs into the back of the Blackhawk without asking, even though this means Lucy is going to sit in his lap and kiss him senseless the whole time. I start to congratulate him for making so much progress on the dog thing, but when Marilee gets in the passenger seat, she has the tape in her hand and that distracts me. Eddie says he's already lubed it up once and thinks it's okay, but we have to go through the whole disclaimer thing one more time about how he can't vouch for the condition of the tape or what the tape player might get a mind to do. Finally, more to shut him up than anything else, I take the eight-track from Marilee and cram it into the player.

We all wait.

Nothing. Nothing for a while. No chewing, which is good, but no sound either. Then a couple of little thumps and a scrap of music. Honey's voice, just a word or two of it. The aborted strum of a guitar. A couple of more thumps. Marilee asking if this is a good place to set something. Another bit of song, enough to know for sure that it's Elvis. A line and a half, then silence. We wait for at least a minute, none of us speaking, then I hit eject. The tape slides right out and everyone exhales in unison, even the dog.

“The first time I tried to play it, your voice—” I start, but Marilee has heard enough. She seems to remember the day precisely, the way she seems to remember everything from that era.

“We were in the jungle room,” she says. “He recorded there sometimes. Did your mama tell you that? But no, you say no, you say she didn't tell you anything. It was about noon, so everybody else in the house was asleep. That's the first thing you learn at Graceland. If you want to hide something, you gotta do it in full daylight.”

“I'm sorry I couldn't get you more of the song,” Eddie says. I cut him off at once.

“Did Elvis write those lyrics?” I ask Marilee.

“If he did—” says Eddie.

“I know,” I say. “It would make it worth a fortune. Elvis wasn't known for writing songs.”

Marilee doesn't say anything. She just sits still and square in her seat, like she's gone to church.

“It was his song, right?” I ask.

“Yeah. It was his.”

“Was there ever any more to it? Or just those first lines?”

She hesitates. Just a little too long for my taste. “That's all.”

“But it could still be valuable,” I say. “The sad thing is that he made a mistake right off the bat with the lyrics. He ended the first line with ‘water,' and there's no logical word that rhymes with ‘water.' You could say ‘squatter' or ‘rotter,' but they're not exactly lyrical.”

“What about ‘daughter'?” Marilee says, still staring straight ahead over the low sloped dashboard of the Blackhawk.

“‘Daughter'?” I say. “It's not bad, but it's not—”

“It works if you don't mind it being a soft rhyme,” she says. “Elvis always slurred his words when he sang, you know. That made it easier for us to go with soft rhymes.”

“Us?”

“Him, I mean. Since he's the one who wrote it.”

She's lying to me. Maybe she's been lying to me since the moment when I first walked down her pier. Not the straight-in-your-face kind of lie or the I'm-going-to-screw-you-over kind of lie, but the gentler sort. What Bradley calls a Christian lie. The kind where what you say is true enough but you stop short of telling the whole story because the whole story is complex, and inconvenient, and it might piss all over somebody's future or break somebody's heart.

“What do I owe you?” I say, turning to Eddie. “You said you'd fix it and you did.”

“You don't owe him a thing,” Marilee says. “I'll pay him for his time with pork and shrimp.” She cuts me off before I can thank her. “Consider this tape my gift to you,” she says, and she pops open the door.

“With any luck the cops are all home in bed,” says Eddie. “You'll be in Memphis by afternoon.”

Marilee shakes her head. “You need to take 98 to 45 to 78,” she says to me. “Say it back to me.”

For a crazy minute I think she's talking about record speeds but then I realize she means roads.

“Take 98 to 45 to 78,” I repeat.

“Seriously?” says Eddie. “Then maybe she won't be in Memphis by afternoon. I know we said she needs to stick to back roads, but 98 to 45 to 78 is a ride. Well, girl, you won't miss a swamp anywhere in the state of Mississippi, that's for damn sure.”

“It'll take her through Tupelo,” Marilee says, still staring out straight ahead like she's seeing some road that's not there, her profile as calm as a queen on a coin and still giving no sign as to how she feels about being back in the Blackhawk after all these years. How it feels to hear her voice on that tape along with Honey and Elvis, carrying her back to a time that I still don't know if she loved or if she hated.

“Oh God,” I say. “Tupelo. That's right. There's a receipt from Tupelo I found when I cleaned out the car. You and Mama bought something there for a dollar ninety-five.”

“Honey.”

“What'd she buy?”

“Honey's what we bought. A jar of tupelo honey from a roadside stand on Highway 45.”

“Why?” I say. “Because of her nickname?”

“Tupelo's the best honey in the world,” says Eddie.

I ignore him. “Do you remember the name of the stand where you got it?”

Marilee shakes her head. “Roadside stands don't have names.”

“Tupelo's not exactly on the way,” I say, pointing to the map crumpled up at Marilee's feet. “Why did the two of you go through there? Surely not just to buy honey. Honey's all over the state. Were you looking for Elvis's birthplace?”

Marilee snorts, but still doesn't turn her head. “I'd already seen it, what there was to see. Just a little shotgun house. Nothing to stop for there. His folks were as poor as white folks were allowed to be.”

“But the baby's grave is in Tupelo too,” I say. “Jesse? His twin brother who died.”

Marilee suddenly reaches up for the leather strap and begins to heave her weight out of the car.

“I have to get back,” she says. “I've got three hours until the lunch crowd.”

“That clock on the dash isn't right,” I tell her.

“Never was.”

Part of me wants to get on the road, but on another level, the fact that she's moving panics me. She's already half out of the car and Eddie has pushed up the seat, getting ready to follow her. Within minutes I will be back on my own. I catch her shoulder and she turns.

“Why're you sending me through Tupelo? Not to see a birthplace or a grave or some roadside stand selling honey. There's something else you're still not telling me.”

“Your mama would have my head on a platter if she knew I'd said even this much.”

“Maybe so, but your head's safe enough. Mama's dead.”

“That she is.” Marilee says, pulling herself to her feet. “So I may as well tell you we carried him as far as Tupelo, crazy out of
his gourd with drugs and talking nonsense the whole way. Your mama said she felt sorry for him. Felt a sense of duty despite all he'd done with her and to her. We left him in a cheap motel with a bucket of ice and a Bible on the bedside table, and we turned the television to some golf game, since that was the only channel that wasn't talking about the death of Elvis. ‘Find him something peaceful to wake up to,' that's what Honey said, ‘because the world's gone crazy.' Why she cared so much about what that trifling white boy woke up to is beyond me. But I guess she still loved him, despite it all.”

“Loved who?” I say. I'm desperate, because I know I'm getting ready to lose Marilee for good. I can see it in the set of her shoulders, the way she turns from me and this car, pointing her feet back in the direction of Mobile Bay. She'll go back to the pier and wash my sick sweat out of her sheets and she'll give Eddie a dozen big southern farmhand-sized lunches in exchange for fixing my tape and keeping my secrets. She's a decent woman and she'll do the decent thing. For me, just like she did for my mama. But she gives me one more tiny scrap of the wrinkled, chewed-up truth for the road. She throws it back over her shoulder, just as casual as you throw a dog a hush puppy, throws it as she's walking toward the flatbed truck.

“David Beth” she says. “Everybody called him Nunchucks. If I've done my counting right, he's the one who's most likely your blood father. We left his sad ass at a Rest-A-While in Tupelo in August of 1977, and far as I know, it's still there.”

PART FOUR

Tupelo, Mississippi

CORY

June 3, 2015

I
feel it happening all around me—the sense that I'm sinking, that something's getting deeper. At some point during the last three days, the car must have driven over that invisible line between the South and
The South
. I've watched the social acceptability of Georgia slowly give way to the anxiety of Alabama and then the complete throwing-in-the-towel-ness of Mississippi.

I sort of envy Mississippi. It must be a relief to be the undisputed worst at everything. To have it all counted up and documented and put on a graph, so that the whole world can see your failure, and there's no longer any point in pretending. When I started out this morning, I would have said I'm like Alabama, near the bottom but not totally bottomed out, always looking around the room trying to find somebody more fucked up than me. The drunk girl ragging on somebody drunker, the person three months behind on the rent sneering at the person who's four. Nothing's any meaner than a loser who still has just a little bit left to lose. But now I'm thinking it might be better to
admit that I'm more like Mississippi and to just let my life fall at my feet with a thunk.

I pass a yard that has a flag lying on the ground in front of a tombstone that reads
RIP AMERICA
and then right beside it, on a slightly more hopeful note, somebody's put a wheelbarrow with another sign reading Melons for Sale. So all the clichés about the angry South are there, but it's also true that now that I've slowed down and taken my time to really look, the road before me has become a fairyland. The trees vault high and grow together, touching branch to branch over the road, turning it into a leafy green tunnel with sunlight waiting at the end. And once I'm through that tunnel I find myself crossing a huge expanse of marsh, the cypresses standing like soldiers knee deep in the sparkling water, and still I keep driving, with Elvis coming at me through the speakers, his voice sad and low and holy.

“He was,” my mama said once, “a beautiful man.” I don't remember in particular what prompted the statement. She didn't say his name. She didn't have to. All those years when I was growing up, she so rarely said the words
Elvis
or
Graceland,
and yet somehow they were all around us, whispering from every corner. Whispering my name as much as hers. The longer I drive, the more certain I become that Mama must have called Marilee when she got sick. Maybe she even called Philip too, and that's why neither of them was surprised to hear that she was dead and why they weren't particularly surprised to see me coming through either. They knew I existed, and probably knew that I would shortly find the Blackhawk. They had been true and purely warned that Cory Beth Ainsworth was the sort of stubborn girl who would get in that car and drive it west no
matter what anybody tried to tell her. Because the more the coincidences add up, the more I'm forced to admit that there's nothing coincidental about any of this. Even after Mama turned back into Laura there must have been a little bit of Honey left in her, and the Honey part set up this whole thing. Maybe she even had Bradley's help. What am I saying? Of course she had Bradley's help. The man's gone to Florida every spring since I can remember and never once forgot his waders, not until now.

The car was always waiting in the shed. Waiting for the moment when Mama was too far gone to be hurt or shamed, waiting for the moment when even careful, slow-moving Bradley was willing to unleash the truth. My mind flashes back to one summer day, maybe twenty-five years ago, when we were all at the cabin and Bradley had taken me out fishing. He and I were in the rowboat, drifting down the marsh, and it was getting dark and he said the tide was turning, so we started rowing back to the cabin. It had rained the day before. The river was swollen and dark, the color of chocolate milk. Bradley was doing the bulk of the rowing, like he usually did, and I was dragging my hand through the water, like I always do, for there is something in me that loves the sensation of the marsh slipping between my fingers, the truth of it both there and not there even in the same instant. We were almost back when we saw her. Mama was coming out of the shed, walking up that steep hill fast, not looking back. The word
scramble
would not have been inappropriate to describe her movements. That's how fast and how awkward she was, and I said to Bradley, “What was Mama doing in the shed?”

He said “Look.” He pointed. He said there was a hawk, a big dark one, flying high above the trees. Did I see it?

Of course I didn't see it. There wasn't any hawk to see. He just knew that I liked them, that all he'd have to do is say the word and I'd be distracted, leaning back and shading my eyes, forgetting all about Mama coming out of the shed and walking so fast. I guess she must have visited the car sometimes, on those rare occasions when she had a moment alone. The car's a Blackhawk and he told me to look for a black hawk and maybe that means something too, something I still don't understand.

Dinner was late that night, which dinner hardly ever was. We were a well-organized family. We ate at six thirty on the day the
Challenger
blew up and also on the day my grandparents were killed by a drunk driver, just as they were pulling out of the church parking lot. We ate at six thirty on 9/11 and every Christmas Eve of my life. But on this particular day it was nearly eight before Mama called us in, with no explanation as to why. Bradley and I pulled up on the shore, fishless like we so often were, and it occurs to me now—belatedly, like everything seems to occur to me, for I am God's own fool, a Mississippi girl to the roots of her soul—that when Bradley took me fishing, his intention never was to fish. It was the time we had alone, him and me, drifting on the water. We rarely talked, but the silence was companionable, and I guess it gave Mama something too. A chance to go deep into her own mind, to find whatever shards of Honey might still be left there. Evidently on this particular day our fishing trip gave her the chance to pay homage to the Blackhawk, sealed up as tight as a memory can be.

I struggle to pull my mind back to the present, to the reality
of this hot Mississippi day. I've been driving steadily but not too fast. A sign says that Tupelo is thirty-four miles away and I've made good time, all things considered. Eddie was wrong. I'll be there comfortably by lunchtime, back roads or not, and I'd like to pee but there's no place to, and then my eye falls on a billboard, another stinking billboard with just a man's face. But this man isn't running for political office, he's aiming for a different kind of glory. David Beth, the sign says. Pastor of Pinnacle Church and host of the Pinnacle Radio Ministry, and I swear I would throw my head back and scream if it wouldn't wake up the dog.

Did my mother ever fuck a man who didn't end up on a billboard? Am I destined to drive through life with every sign that heaven intends to send me on an actual goddamn sign?

David Beth. A pastor. A radio preacher. The second candidate for the role of being my biological father. The lowest of the low, but at least he's still in Tupelo, just as Marilee predicted.

David Beth. He kept his name or maybe more to the point, he dropped the “Nunchucks” and went back to his original name. He looks buffed and polished and phony as Vegas, but still a little bit handsome.
My daddy's hot,
I think, and I look up into his face for so long that the Blackhawk, easing its way up to sixty like the Blackhawk always wants to do, edges off the pavement and begins to rumble a warning. I get it back on the road, but I wake up Lucy in the process and, even worse, I draw the attention of the car behind me, which swings out and rides parallel to me for quite a while, long after David Beth fades from sight. It makes me uncomfortable, a car swinging out to pass on a two-lane road as curvy as this one, and taking
its sweet time about it. It refuses to cut around me, even when I give the Blackhawk the brake. In fact, the car very pointedly flanks me for a handful of long seconds until I finally look over and lo and behold, I see what I've feared since the moment I left Beaufort.

A cop.

He rides parallel but he does not pass and he does not turn on his siren. The car is too close for me to see the writing on the door, to figure out if this cop is state or local and exactly what depth of trouble I'm in. Then suddenly it accelerates and pulls away and I see that I've been accosted not by a legitimate officer at all, but rather by a joke of a cop, a parody of law enforcement.

The emblem on the side of his door reads
GRACELAND SECURITY
. Hell, he doesn't have a siren. He probably doesn't have any authority either or at least not here—not thirty miles from Tupelo and probably ninety miles from Memphis.

And yet he lifts his finger. He lifts his pudgy cop's finger off the steering wheel and points toward the side of the road. I take my foot off the gas and start looking for a place wide enough to pull over without being on the lip of the swamp.

I find it in the parking lot of an elementary school. I cut off the engine and glance down at the missing-person poster in the passenger seat beside me. Not much point in hiding it now.

He won't ask for my license or registration. He's not entitled to such and he and I both know it. This man is no more than one beat up from mall security, and at least three beats down from the sheriff's deputy of whatever godforsaken county I've managed to drive myself into. And yet he strides slowly up to
me, adjusting his manhood as he walks, and I wonder why on earth he's here, so far from Graceland, but of course part of me knows the answer, even as I'm asking the question. When I left Beaufort in this car, I flipped a domino. Set off a whole chain of events.

I stare straight ahead as he approaches. The sign in the schoolyard says something about sixth-grade graduation. There's an upcoming bake sale. A track meet. Congratulations go out to the winner of their spelling bee, a girl with an Indian name. Well, good for her. Good for all of them.

He leans down. I look up.

And he says, “Are you Cory Beth Ainsworth?”

And I say, “Yes, I am. But you know that already, don't you?”

He smiles. It's not a bad smile, all things considered. Not mean or even sarcastic. He says, “I believe you may be in possession of our property.”

I don't make a fuss. There's no point. I called Graceland of my own free will and told them I had the car. I put a bunch of coins in a payphone and dialed the number on my arm and proudly, stupidly announced the fact to a man named Fred. Marilee described him as old, and Marilee is no spring chicken, so apparently this Fred is prepared to live forever. He once harassed my mother and Marilee and now he seems hell-bent on harassing me.

“I'm only trying to get the car back to Graceland,” I say, which is more-or-less somewhat true. “That has been my full intent since the beginning of my journey. But I will admit that I was hoping to spend some time here in Tupelo first.”

“Of course you are,” says the man. “Tupelo's important.” He
is possibly the first person in history to ever utter this sentence and yet I find myself nodding.

“I know you've been looking for me,” I say, handing him the poster. “Or I know you've been looking for the car. I was in Fairhope, Alabama, and the local police brought it around to the post office . . .”

This pleases him.

“We cooperate,” he says, “with local and state authorities on all sides of the lines.”

He says “the lines” with such great pride that I can only assume he means the state lines between Tennessee and Mississippi and Alabama. Or hell, possibly farther. For all I know, posters showing me and Mama and Elvis and this car are spread all over the country. Maybe even the world.

“Perhaps,” the cop adds, “the Fairhope officer was so thorough because he's hoping to someday hold a position with us.” He says it like working Graceland security is the absolute height of law enforcement, like right now every cop in America is fighting and scrapping for his job.

Three days ago I would have snapped back. I would have said something smartass, made some attempt to put this guy in his place. But I remember what Eddie told me, that I'm white and female and reasonably pretty and that there's power in all that, so I smile. I give him my best pretty white girl smile and I say, “I eagerly await my arrival at Graceland. It's the shame of my lifetime that I've never been. But please don't make me go quite yet. Not when there's so much in Tupelo to see.”

“Like what?” he says. He knows damn well like what.

“Well, there's the house where Elvis was born,” I say. “That's
a given. And I want to go to the church of David Beth. I believe the sign I passed awhile back said he was the pastor of Pinnacle Church.”

“Why do you want to see David Beth?” he says. He's fat. Close to fifty. Has a crappy job that he thinks is a good job and I've seen a thousand men like this, working the same bars that I have, from Cape Cod to Key West, towing cars and bouncing out drunks and bumming free drinks and hitting on girls way above their station. I know how to play them as well as my guitar. But for some reason I trust this Graceland cop, whose badge says Dirk, so I take a chance on the truth.

“Because I'm looking for my biological father,” I tell him. “And I have reason to believe he may be the pastor of Pinnacle Church. I won't leave Tupelo until I find out, and frankly, it would be easier if you helped me. Helped me with all of it. I need someone who can really show me the town.”

He's flattered, just like I hoped he'd be, but still he hesitates. “I'm from Memphis, not Tupelo.”

“Of course you are. But you've been here a dozen times, ­haven't you? And you work at Graceland so you know everything there is to know about Elvis, from birth to death. I bet you're qualified to lead every tour yourself. I bet you know things they don't even tell the regular tourists, the behind-the-scenes stuff.”