Last Ride to Graceland (21 page)

“You must understand . . .”

“I understand just fine.”

“I'm not sure you do. I had a destiny. I knew it. And anything that distracted me from that destiny was against the will of God.”

“Anything like Mama and me.”

“I'm not suggesting that you and your mother were against the will of God. Of course not. But it was not my calling to move to some small town in South Carolina and run a karate school while Honey taught piano and the two of us tried to eke out some meager living on the marsh. It wouldn't have been fair to either me or her, and it certainly wouldn't have been fair to the child in question. Raising you was not the task God put me on this earth to do, and I think you're beginning to see that, even though the look on your face in this particular moment, if I might say so, is very unpleasant. It's a shame it isn't Wednesday or Sunday, when we have our regular services. If you could observe my work in the pulpit, it would all be clear to you.”

“You think you're too good to be a daddy.”

“It has nothing to do with you. It's just that fatherhood is for ordinary men.”

He rips the check out of the checkbook and hands it to me. I'm ashamed to tell you that I take it and that I look at the amount. A thousand dollars, pure and simple, no questions asked, and precious few answered.

I hand him back the check. “I need cash.”

“I assure you a Pinnacle Church check won't bounce.”

“You're probably right, but I don't have a bank account. At
least not out here.”

He slides open a drawer. “I may not be able to come up with a thousand in cash.”

I nod. I don't trust my voice.

He digs around. Opens one box and then another. Winces at some point, although I'm not sure why. And finally comes up with $320. He hands it to me along with the check and says “Keep it all. You'll find your way home eventually.”

Will I? I stand up, fold the check and the cash, and stick the whole mess into my pocket, then heft up my backpack, with this man's saliva and hair and earwax tucked inside of it.

“It's kind of ironic you should end up a Mississippi preacher,” I say as I turn toward the door. “Considering you were born a Jew.”

“I'm still a Jew,” he says, “at least in a cultural sense.”

“But you're a Christian and a Buddhist and a Rastafarian too.”

He smiles. “I suppose I am, and don't forget the Hindus. That's why your question about blood—while understandable under the circumstances—ultimately doesn't matter. We are not our biology. We are all more than where we were born, and whatever particular sperm and egg randomly happened to unite. Remember this, my child, even if you choose to ignore everything else I've told you. In the end,
people are whatever they choose to be.”

HONEY

W
e can't just leave him here.”

Marilee looks like she's going to lean back and slap me. “Of course we can. Don't go soft on me, not now. Why did you think we were giving up better than half our money to get him into this hotel if we weren't going to leave him here?”

“Maybe we can just let him sleep it off. We can't let him wake up alone with no car or money.”

Marilee purses her lips. “We promised Fred we'd get him out of Memphis and we got him out of Memphis.”

“He's sick.”

“If he was going to die, he'd have died before now.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because he took the same thing Elvis took, and it killed Elvis fast. And if Jesus ever stops to ask me my opinion of the last twenty-four hours, I'll look him right in the eye and tell him he took the wrong one home to heaven and left the wrong one in this sorry-ass bed, and I won't even blink when I say it.”

I look at David, lying flat as a corpse with the cheap flowered bedspread pulled over him. We should try to get his clothes off. At least take off his shoes.

“I'm going to get him a bucket of ice,” I say. “And a sandwich. So he'll have something to eat when he wakes up.”

“Suit yourself,” Marilee snaps. She pulls the Gideon's Bible out of the drawer of the bedside table and sits down in the room's single chair. I take the plastic ice bucket in my hand and step out the door onto the sidewalk. I look first one way and then the next, but I don't see an ice machine. It's probably in the lobby, along with that wailing woman and her African violets and every TV channel in the world all proclaiming the death of Elvis, and I don't think I can face going back in there again. And as for a sandwich . . . I look up and down the road in both directions, but I don't see a fast food place or even a service station. How on earth does this hotel survive, here on the outskirts of nowhere?

“Okay, so maybe not a sandwich and maybe not ice,” I tell Marilee, coming back into the room. She's reading what looks like the tail end of the book, somewhere back in Revelations, probably looking to see how many signs of the end of the world we've amassed so far. “Maybe I'll just leave him a cup of water. And let's turn the TV to something nice for when he wakes up.”

She stands with a sigh, plopping the Bible onto the bedside table and picking up the remote. I go into the sad little bathroom and fill a plastic cup with water, and when I come back she has the TV turned to golf.

“It's the only station that wasn't talking about Elvis,” she says. “Now, enough. We gotta get going.”

At the doorway I pause. I think about looking back, but I don't.
This is the last time you'll see him,
says that voice in my head. The one that seems to talk to me even when I wish that it wouldn't.

Here in Tupelo

Our story ends and begins

Middle still to come.

No good. I'm trying to say something, but that isn't it. I try again.

Good-bye to this man

Father of my unborn child

Too bad he's out cold.

Even worse. Marilee is walking across the parking lot toward the Blackhawk. She glances back. “What are you doing?”

“Making up a haiku.”

“Haiku your ass over here,” she growls, climbing into the driver's side without asking.

I get in. Pull the seat belt around me, and we begin to back out.

“It might be Philip Cory's,” she tells me. “Just as easy could be.”

“I know.”

“And you'll find your way back. Eventually.”

Back from what?
I think, but I don't ask the question out loud. I know Marilee is trying to buck me up, but I can't face this conversation. Not now, when we're driving away from the motel where I'm leaving the first man I ever loved. David is trash. I know that and I don't need Marilee pointing it out, regular as a clock, every mile from here to Fairhope. He was trash, but I loved him, and as it turns out, leaving a pile of trash in a Tupelo motel hurts just as much as bidding farewell to a prince.

I lay my head back against the red leather seats. They're soft. I've always loved this car. It was always my favorite, of all the cars Elvis drove, and I think it was because of this leather. I rub my cheek against the smoothness.

“There's one more thing to do,” Marilee says. “Before we leave Tupelo.”

I glance over at her. “And what's that?”

“I'm taking you to see the baby's grave.”

CORY

Y
ou know what that preacher had the balls to say to me? He said he was bigger than Elvis.”

Dirk grabs his chest and staggers around like he's been shot. “He did not.”

“Oh, but he did. I don't know if there's any point in going to Express Paternity after all. I looked at his hands while he was talking and they . . . they looked just like mine.”

To illustrate, I hold my hands out. I show him my abnormal index finger, nearly as long as my fuck-you finger, and the only thing on my body that doesn't look like my mama. The only thing on my body that looks exactly like David Beth.

We're walking Lucy around the well-manicured grounds of the Pinnacle Church. He's already crapped three times. The first one, I picked up with a Kleenex from my backpack and threw in a trash can. The second one, I kicked pine straw over. The third one I just ignored.

“But you got the evidence,” Dirk says.

“I got a razor and a toothbrush and a Q-tip.”

“And we have the blood from the dentist,” he says, turning the dog slow and easy back toward the car. “I don't reckon you thought to get anything from that Philip guy in Georgia.”

I shake my head. A church bell rings from somewhere, even though Pinnacle doesn't seem to have a steeple. It's four o'clock. Whatever we're going to do, we need to get going.

“You may as well take what you've got to Express Paternity,” Dirk says, as if the chimes gave him the same thought. “They say it takes three hours, but you can call them tomorrow and see what they find. Or hell, maybe they run extended hours, who can say. Do you want to see Jesse's grave?”

“I didn't think there was anything to see.”

He shrugs. “You can find it if you're know where to look. It's on the east side of town, a little place called Priceville Cemetery, and there's a marker that reads 1935–1935.”

“Is it grand?”

“Grand? No. Not at all. It's small.” He brightens. “But there's a marker in Jesse's honor at Graceland, where Elvis is buried with his parents, out in the Meditation Garden, and that, my friend, is absolutely glorious. Wait until you see it. You'll fall to your knees.”

“But they never moved the baby.”

“No. Not the actual body.”

“That's sad. Thinking of him lying there all by himself, his little baby skeleton curved like a cat.”

Dirk opens the door of the Blackhawk and Lucy jumps right in.

“We got no way of knowing if he's curved like a cat,” he
says. “But what we do know is that we've got less than an hour to get you to the DNA testing place and then I gotta get back to Graceland.”

“You're going back without me? That shows a lot of trust.”

“I've been thinking I need to go in first and smooth the way with Pop. Get him used to the idea of who you are and what you deserve. Because you deserve something. Something good. Not just gas money and a kick in the ass.”

We're backing out. I don't ask him where he's going because he seems to know. A quick stop at Express Paternity, a circle through the Walmart to get his Graceland cop car. Then he will drive back to Memphis and I will not be far behind him. According to Dirk's phone, there's a La Quinta on the south side of Memphis, not more than three miles from the gates of Graceland, and that's where Lucy and I will spend the night.

“You're a decent man,” I say to Dirk as we roll out of the gates of Pinnacle and turn back toward the highway.

“So's my daddy, at least once you dig a little. Remember that tomorrow when he starts to give you shit. Because he will.”

I nod. “Marilee said to make him pay me for the car. But I think I have something even more valuable.” I wait for a stoplight and then I push the eight-track into the slot and Dirk listens. He hits repeat and listens to it again, and then again. It's only twenty seconds of sound, maybe not even that much, but it's my future and he and I both know it.

“Elvis wrote that piece of song?”

“Elvis and Marilee and my mama.”

“Memphis is full of recording studios.”

“So I've heard.”

“And Sirius has an all-Elvis station. It broadcasts from the grounds of Graceland.”

“I know.”

“I'm saying this, because . . . What you've got there is gold, girl.”

We ride for a few minutes in silence. Dirk navigates the streets of Tupelo like a pro and within minutes we pull up in the parking lot of Express Paternity. It's nothing fancy. Just a strip center medical front, the sort of place where you go if you manage to get yourself knocked up in Tupelo, Mississippi, and you don't know how or why.

“You got a voice,” he says. “I heard you singing to the dog in the church parking lot when we were waiting for him to take a crap.”

“Thank you.”

“You sing harmony like your mama?”

I shake my head. “She tried to teach me, but I never got the knack. It may have been the biggest exasperation of her life. She kept me in the church choir till I turned eighteen, and every long car trip we ever took, she'd be on me again, determined she was going to teach me how to pick apart a chord and hear every individual note. Finally we both had to admit it. That maybe I was born to be a solo act.”

“It's not such a bad thing, is it? To be the one with the star voice?”

“Depends on who you ask.”

He rolls down the window. It's a sign that he and the dog will wait here in the car. Because I need to take my sack o' DNA into Express Paternity and give them my own blood as
well. I look at the clock, even though I know it's broken, and then at Dirk's watch. I've got twenty minutes.

“Where you reckon you got that star voice?” he asks idly. “Who gave it to you?”

Just a few days ago I would've told you Elvis gave it to me,
I thought. But that was four days and a thousand miles ago.

“Nobody,” I say. “I gave it to myself.”

An hour
later, I'm on my own again, with just one more stop to make in Tupelo. I drive up and down Highway 45 until I find a roadside stand. Probably not the right roadside stand, not the same one where Mama and Marilee stopped, but close enough.

I ask them for tupelo honey.

The guy working the place is a talker. He starts telling me how tupelo honey isn't really from the town of Tupelo, despite what everybody thinks. They harvest it somewhere in the panhandle of Florida, from some magical swamp, and it is terribly special stuff. He tells me how they prime the hives for months, then carry them down the river in rowboats and put them in the tupelo trees, which bloom for only a few weeks a year. It's a dicey business. The swamp, the gators, rowing those hives down in the boats, the short growing season. That's why the honey is so expensive. It is the result of many things that could have gone wrong but that have somehow managed to collectively go right.

He hands me a jar. A small jar, but the tag says eighteen dollars, and I start to tell him my mama bought a jar of honey at this very stand—or at least one like it—for less than two dollars,
but that was such a long ago that it hardly matters. At his insistence, I raise the jar up to the sunlight and study the color. It's a light amber gold, with just the slightest touch of green.

“Its rarity is what makes it so expensive,” he says. “Its rarity and its purity.”

There's a billboard just past this little roadside stand. I didn't see it when I pulled in, but I see it now as I raise the jar to the setting sun. Another one of David Beth, and he's stretching out a hand in invitation. It's a normal-looking hand, not like his or mine. The index finger is the right length and he's staring in a way that makes it seem like he's looking just at you. Come to the Father, the billboard says, and I look down at the Band-Aid in the crook of my elbow.

I laugh, which the guy working the roadside stand seems to take as a laugh of disbelief as to the value of tupelo honey. One honeybee only produces one-tenth of a teaspoon of nectar in its lifetime, he hastens to explain, and it takes two million tupelo tree flowers to produce one pound of honey. He goes on and on like this for some time. He's a born salesman, wasting his talent at this little produce stand by Highway 45, or maybe it's my sustained silence that upsets him, because I can't seem to think of anything to say.

Of course you must pay for rarity. And purity. And the sacrifice of many, even if the many is only flowers and bees and swamp farmers. So even though this small jar is eighteen dollars, I give him twenty and tell him to keep the change. I open the jar on the spot and stick my finger in. The honey is buttery and smooth and something else. Something I have no word for. I stand here, flat-footed by Highway 45 with my fin
ger in my mouth, and try to think of the word for what I'm feeling.

“They say it is impossible to describe,” says the man working the stand.

“They're right.”

“And so you see what I'm saying? You aren't disappointed?”

I tell him no, that I'm not disappointed. I take my small, expensive jar and climb back into the Blackhawk, and begin to drive north. Toward Memphis, my last stop. Toward Memphis, where it seems like I've been heading my whole life.