Last Ride to Graceland (18 page)

“I'm supposed to take you in,” he says.

“And you will. I promise. We'll head to Memphis straight after this. But what difference does it make what time of day we get there?”

He's tempted. He sways back and forth on his legs, which are planted wide apart.

“Come on,” I say. “I'm only asking for an hour or two. Show me around.” But still he's still kind of fretful, so I play my trump card.

“Maybe you'd like to drive the car?”

Only one
event of note has ever happened in Tupelo, Mississippi, so it's not hard to figure out where our tour will begin. Dirk pulls right up in front of Elvis's birthplace in the Blackhawk and even manages to parallel park the thing. He's as eager to show it off as I was to hide it, and I pull in behind him. I'm driving the Graceland Security car, with Lucy riding shotgun beside me. He's already licked the passenger-side window blurry.

I'd seen pictures and was prepared to be underwhelmed, but still . . . the little frame house where Elvis was born is shockingly small, no bigger than a train car. If it wasn't for a single marker in the yard—one of those plain black-and-white historical signs—you'd shoot right by the place without a glance.

“Here you have it,” Dirk says. “Humble as a manger. Just one of many shotgun houses that the cotton pickers all lived in during the thirties.”

Marilee had used the same term, but I didn't understand it. “Why'd they call them shotgun houses?”

“ 'Cause they're built so skinny. Laid out with one room behind another. The notion was that you could stand in the front doorframe and shoot a gun down the hall and it'd go clean out the back door without hitting a thing. But this is where Elvis took his first breath.”

“No hospital?”

“No, and you can see why not. Vernon and Gladys Presley were hardly more than kids themselves when the time came, and dirt poor.”

“Midwife delivery?”

“Yep.”

“And Jesse Garon was first, born dead.”

Dirk nods. “They say the midwife almost lost Gladys too, that the blood and the pains wouldn't stop. Of course she hadn't seen a doctor the whole time, so they didn't know she was delivering twins, not until—”

“The second boy came. Elvis Aron. They were too poor to even afford another A.”

He stiffens. “You think this is funny?”

“I assure you that I don't.”

He looks at me skeptically, but continues. “It was January. The ground was frozen hard. So hard they couldn't bury their first boy for better than a week. They say he lay that whole time on the kitchen table in a little shoebox.”

“Good God.” I would have sworn I knew all the Elvis stories, but this bit about the shoebox catches me unaware.

“So of course the surviving child—” Dirk breaks off.

Entered the world fucked up beyond belief
is what I think, but I say, “He must have been a very cherished baby.”

Dirk nods. “And with Gladys nearly dying in the delivery, I guess they knew he'd be their only one from the start.”

Like me,
I think, but of course I don't add that. It's just strange that this is the first time it's really hit me, this particular similarity between Elvis and myself. Both born to parents barely
out of their teens, born to be only children, always special and always alone.

“Elvis learned to sing in the Assembly of God Church on Adams Street,” Dirk says, pointing down the street. “We'll drive by there next, even though there's not much to see. Less than this. They say that when his parents took him to service, he used to crawl under their feet and walk down the aisle, clapping his hands to the beat of the gospel music. And one time when he was a toddler, he slipped clean away from them and went up into the choir. Nobody knows why. He was too little to know the words, or how to sing, but he just seemed to know that's where he belonged.”

“Wouldn't you know to find me in my father's house?” I say.

“You know your Bible.”

“My granddaddy was a preacher. I didn't have any choice but to know my Bible.” And of course everybody who's read anything about Elvis knows how he'd slip away from his parents and hide in the choir. I've always wondered if he told that story to so many reporters because it's so similar to how Mary and Joseph found Jesus talking with the rabbis in the temple. It makes Elvis seem likewise chosen from the start, with a destiny too large to outrun or ignore.

Dirk is in full tour-guide mode now. “And when he was twelve his mama scrimped and saved and bought him his first guitar. After he got famous, whenever any interviewer would ask him about that first guitar, Elvis would always tell them—”

“
What I really wanted was a bike
,” I say. Actually Dirk and I say it in unison and he turns to me, surprised, the word
bike
half ending in a laugh.

“So you know your Elvis too,” he says.

“Maybe not everything, but yeah, I've done some reading.”

“But even with all that you swear you've never been to Graceland?”

I shake my head.

“I'm only asking because you look kind of familiar.”

“Everybody says that.”

“Do you want to go inside?”

To my surprise I don't. “I'm not sure I can take it. It'll only make me sad.”

“I shouldn't have told you about the dead baby on the kitchen table,” Dirk said. “Women don't like that part of the story.”

“And men do?”

This stops him for a minute. “No, come to think of it, I don't guess anybody likes that part of the story. But I'm sorry if I offended your sensibilities.” He almost says
ma'am
. I can hear it implied.

I shake my head. “I'm not sad for the boy who died,” I say. “I'm sad for the one who lived.”

We drive
by the Assembly of God church and then Dirk tells me how when we get to Memphis—he says “we”—that we'll have to take time to go past Sun Records. In 1954 Elvis paid them four dollars to record his first demo. They saw he had talent and signed him on the spot, but nobody knew what to do with a white boy who sounded like he was black. This was Tennessee, after all, and more than sixty years ago, and the airwaves
were as segregated as the water fountains. So Sun Records put what they considered to be a black song, “That's When Your Heartaches Begin,” on the B side and a white song, “My Happiness,” on the A side and sent the record to every radio station in Mississippi, no matter what their formats, figuring that they'd let the audience make the call.

Only both the A and the B sides went to number one and from then on, Elvis always had both black and white backup singers whenever he would record or go on tour. It was an acknowledgment of the twin roots of his musical power. Proof he was the first artist to sing like all of America, not just half of it. Proof that he had come to bring us happiness and heartache in the same spin of the turntable.

Dirk tells me this as we drive around. I already know most of these stories, but I let him tell me again. At some point we ditch the Graceland Security car in the parking lot of a Walmart and he looks at me with a question on his face. I shake my head. He can keep driving. The Blackhawk is making him so happy that it would be cruel to take the keys back, and, besides, even though he's mostly only telling me things I've read a dozen times before, I'm enjoying the sound of his voice. Part of me has been making fun of him, but I'm just as big an Elvis nerd, reading every Wikipedia article and every trashy tabloid claiming he's still alive. In fact, I'm warming to Dirk more every minute. There's something in his way that feels easy and familiar, like we've met in some previous lifetime, and so I'm not even surprised when, over a late lunch at a meat-and-two diner, he finally breaks down and confides that he's Fred's son.

“I grew up at Graceland,” he says. “More or less.”

“Do you remember my mama? It's okay with me if you don't. She was only there for a year.”

He nods, wiping a smear of gravy from his mouth. He's having meat loaf with limas and mashed potatoes. I'm having panfried chicken with okra and stewed tomatoes. Both of us asked for corn bread but, without discussion, we also both wrapped it in a napkin the minute it came, intending to take it to Lucy, who's waiting in the car. We got him water in a Styrofoam cup and he's okay for now, but as the day gets hotter, as Mississippi days invariably do, we're going to have to come up with a new solution. And there's not a La Quinta in Tupelo. I've already borrowed Dirk's iPhone and looked.

“I sure do remember Honey,” Dirk says, balling up his napkin. “She was sweet. Is that why they called her that?”

“I think it was more her last name: Berry. Elvis started calling her Honey Bear.”

Dirk nods. “Sounds right. I was eleven or twelve when she came, something like that, and I had a crush on Miss Honey something awful. She took the time to talk to me and not everybody did. I mean, I was just Fred's son, just a pimply kid trying to pick up a dollar or two helping the gardener, so most of Graceland didn't take the time to say boo to me. But your mama . . . one time we went in the kitchen and she even made cookies.”

“Let me guess. Oatmeal raisin.”

“How'd you know that?”

“That's the only kind she knew how to make.”

“Yeah,” he says, taking a swig of the wine-dark tea. “Exactly. She fixed me oatmeal raisin cookies, only the cook came in and
found us and didn't like it one bit.” He smiles with the memory. “She even took a swing at your mama with a cast-iron skillet and told her to leave that stove alone, 'cause that's how it was at Graceland. Everybody was supposed to stay in their place. Cooks cooked. Singers sang. Yard boys didn't eat in the kitchen.”

“My mama was—” I say, but then I stop myself as the waitress approaches. It seems to me that she more than takes her sweet time refilling our glasses and I know she's curious about us, just like everybody in the diner probably is. When we came in, Dirk in his Graceland Security uniform and me in my ripped-up jean shorts, we must have seemed like an unlikely pair. And then we asked for water in a to-go cup, but when the waitress tried to put a lid and a straw on it, Dirk told her not to bother, that we had a dog in the car. And he glanced out the door as he said it, so of course she did too, looking right at the Blackhawk parked in the handicapped space, with half a coon-hound hanging out the driver's-side window, barking his head off at anybody who came within fifty feet.

The waitress gawked, but she gave us the water, which Dirk took right out to Lucy, and I'm sure that ever since then, as this girl goes from table to table about her business, she's been pointing us out to everybody in the place, making sure anyone who managed to miss our entrance is twisted in their booths to check us out now. I tug at my shorts, even though my legs aren't visible under the table. I need to change clothes at some point and probably should do it here, in the diner bathroom, even though that'll just give them one more piece to chew over. The woman who entered the bathroom dressed like a hooker and
came out dressed like a lady. Or at least as close to a lady as I'll ever be able to come to. I bought a black knit shift for Mama's funeral and I can't think why I shoved it into the bottom of my backpack in the rush of packing, but now I'm glad I did.

I wait for the waitress to retreat, holding her pitcher of sweet tea in one hand and her pitcher of unsweet tea in the other, then I lean over the table and finish my story.

“My mama was pregnant when she left Graceland.”

Dirk leans forward too. “Carrying you?”

“None other.” I wait for him to say something, but he doesn't. He just feigns an unnatural amount of attention to his lima beans. Finally I say, “It's just like I told you. I have to know.”

He pulls the iPhone out of his pocket. Punches at it with his chubby fingers and finally, after a pause so long that it makes me nervous, he says “Everybody is entitled to a sense of their own personal identity.”

“Exactly. That's the point of this whole trip.”

He shakes his head. “I didn't come up with that off the top of my head. It's the motto of the Express Paternity service, located exactly 2.4 miles from this very diner.”

“Express Paternity? Seriously? That's the name?”

He nods, still squinting at the screen. “I assume you've got something to go on? Something more than a hunch and a car?”

“I've got a Kleenex with the blood of Elvis on it.”

He freezes, finger in midair. “Whatcha mean, the blood of Elvis?”

“He went to the dentist, didn't he, on the last day he drove the car? And he must have bled, you know how you do some
times, when they clean your teeth rough or fill a cavity, and he must have wiped his mouth on a Kleenex while he was driving back to Graceland. It was sitting right there in the cup holder when I found the car.”

Dirk puts the phone down and his eyes, which are that washed-out shade of Levi's blue and prone to bulging, bulge out even more. “So you're thinking—”

“Not so much anymore. It's what I thought at first, but the longer I drive the more I've come to terms with the fact it's not likely Elvis is my daddy. It doesn't look like he and my mama were ever that way. But I do want to go to Express Paternity. If it wasn't Elvis, I have an idea who it might be.”

“Do I even want to hear this?”

“Probably not. Get your corn bread and let's call for the check. We're going to Pinnacle Church. I need to get some DNA from David Beth.” I feel myself nodding as I'm speaking. I've been calm and patient through our morning-long tour of Elvis's youth, both because I like Dirk and because, despite my smartass talk, I really was interested. But now we've paid tribute to the King and had our meat-and-two lunch, and it's time to get on to the real purpose of my visit.