Last Ride to Graceland (22 page)

HONEY

I
t takes us the better part of an hour to find the cemetery. Marilee drives us over half of Tupelo, and at some point we even stop at a roadside stand and buy some fruit to eat on the way. Marilee pays for everything—out of what I don't know, since I still have the money—but when she gets back to the car she hands me a jar and says, “Here. Tupelo honey. To remember the day by.”

Remember the day? Is she kidding? I'm not likely to forget any day that started with screaming and ambulance sirens. Any day that started with me throwing drugs off a dock into the Mississippi River, me leaving the man I love passed out in a Rest-A-While, me wondering what the hell I'm going to do with every mile we put behind us. But I thank her and put the jar of honey down by my feet and we talk a little then. Speculate on the other girls, the other backup singers. Where they will go, what they'll do next, if in all the hysteria of the day anyone will notice that the Blackhawk has gone missing. Gone missing along with Marilee and Nunchucks and Honey.

“We haven't done anything wrong,” Marilee says, taking a bite from one of the apples she bought at the stand.

“Nothing except destroying evidence and stealing a car.”

“Evidence is only evidence if there's been a crime,” she says. “And there's no crime here, just an accident. And nobody stole this car. Elvis gave it to you free and clear.”

“They've only got our word on that.” I look over at her. “Were you close enough to hear when he said it? That I should take the car and go?”

“Not exactly. But you say that's what he said, so I say that's what he said.”

“Great.” I sit back in the seat and look at the scenery, or at least what there is of it. “Do you even know where this graveyard is? Do you have a map?”

“I've been there before. I'll know the turn when I see it.”

But just as I'm thinking we need to give up and get going for sure, Marilee begins to mutter and pulls the car down a road. A nothing road, going from nowhere to nowhere without a single sign to mark it, but she seems to think she's onto something, because she turns, and turns again, and soon enough we roll up to a little graveyard.

“Here we go,” she says, pushing open the door.

I'm not sure why we've come, except that she needs to pay her respects somehow, just like she seemed to feel she needed to buy that jar of tupelo honey. The road to redemption is long and thorny. That's what my daddy always says, and today, for the first time in my life, I'm starting to see what he means. Because this makes no sense, the way Marilee and I are picking our way among the tombstones, half of them tilted and cracked, the
names and dates worn away through the years. There are no monuments, no flowers or concrete angels or quotes from the Bible. The bodies of poor people lie beneath us and it's hard to understand why Elvis, who was so sentimental about family and so superstitious about signs, would leave his dead baby brother to rot here, in this wrecked place.

“Did you ever hear him talk to Jesse?” Marilee asks.

“Sure.” I'd wager we all did at one time or another, whenever he was high or in an especially bad way. It was creepy. In fact, I remember the first time I ever saw Elvis standing backstage before a show, his head bent forward, whispering to a blank wall. I'd thought he was just rehearsing the lyrics and I took it as a good sign. But Fred had shaken his head and said, “Oh Lord, he's talking to Jesse tonight, and that ain't never good.”

We find the grave. Or at least what Marilee claims is the right one. It has a little marker that says 1935–1935, but there's no name. We stand with her on one side and me on the other, both looking down, and she says, “It explains a lot, doesn't it?”

I nod automatically, like a preacher's daughter has been trained to do, but personally I don't think it explains shit. It makes no sense that the Presleys would leave their little lost boy here, in this dump of a graveyard at the end of a nothing road. Why didn't they exhume him and bring him to Graceland and lay him beside his mama—and now his brother—in the fancy meditation garden with its marble and fountains and roses?

“I wanted you to see this,” Marilee says. “I'd seen it, but I wanted you to see it too.”

“And so you keep saying, but now that we're standing here at the end of this dirt road, Marilee, I've got to ask you why.” Maybe it sounds like a mean question, but I'm not trying to be mean. I'm a little bit scared, the two of us out here all alone under the hanging moss, looking down at this tiny marker, with an unembalmed baby beneath it, faded down to his soft, curving bones. I shudder and Marilee looks up.

“I'm just trying to explain things. You came to Graceland so recent. You don't really understand him. Don't understand what all this means.”

“Maybe I don't want to.” I shake my head and start to walk toward the car, hoping Marilee will follow me. Because we've got to get the hell out of here. Put miles behind us. When something has gone as wrong as all this has, driving away is pretty much all you can do. Put miles behind you and direct your faith toward the territory ahead.

But Marilee doesn't follow me. She stands stock-still, looking down at the pitiful little grave, and I turn back toward her, exasperated.

“You brought me here to learn something and I guess I'm too stupid to learn it. So spell it out.”

“I hoped that you seeing the grave might make it easier for you to forgive.”

“Forgive who?” I snap the words.

“To forgive Elvis for dying on us, leaving us like this.” She shrugs. “And anybody else who wasn't what you wanted them to be. Maybe your daddy, I don't know. Nunchucks, that's for sure, and I'm guessing Fantasy Phil back in Macon. Or it could have even been your boyfriend back home in Beaufort. There must
have been some reason you took to the road. We all got somebody we need to forgive.”

“And you think looking at an unmarked grave is going to do that? Gonna give us the peace that passeth all understanding?”

“It's where it starts.”

“Fuck you, Marilee.”

“Don't you talk to me like that. Not in this holy place. Not when we've come to pay tribute to Elvis.”

“Elvis is in Memphis. Shit, Marilee, don't you get it? The ambulances have come and gone by now. The news is out. People are lining up around Graceland, waiting hours for a moment at the foot of his casket. Reporters are camped on the lawn. Celebrities are flying in from all over the world to attend the service. They're gonna give him a big send-off. Gospel and twenty-one gun salutes and eternal flames. He was the King.”

“Maybe so,” Marilee says, turning away at last from the grave. “But part of him never made it out of Tupelo.”

PART FIVE

Memphis, Tennessee

HONEY

August 14, 1977

E
very day at Graceland is strange, but this might be the strangest yet.

Gladys Presley had been forty-two years old when her heart stopped beating. Elvis is forty-two now. And since he's superstitious about everything—especially numbers and family—he's gotten it in his head that he's going to die today, on the exact anniversary of his mama's death.

I guess if you use Elvis logic it makes a kind of sense. Last night at midnight he went upstairs and locked himself in his room and no one has seen him in the eighteen hours since. The whole house has stood silent all day. Nobody's gone to the pool or is watching TV or playing tennis and even the lights in the kitchen are out.

“This ain't right,” Marilee says to me. “Him being alone in the dark all that time,”

“Alone?” I say, and when I glance up the back staircase I feel a little tickle of fear. Elvis is never alone, and especially not
in his bedroom. It's not because of the sex. I've heard rumors—even me, and I'm the last one to hear anything—that he's no longer interested in women “that way.” He's got a new girlfriend, a local beauty queen named Ginger, because if you're Elvis you always have a girlfriend, each one younger and prettier than the last. But Elvis is waning either way. David told me one time that it's like the man's soul is already in the process of leaving his body. He's letting go of this world, inch by inch, but yet—

He still wants someone sleeping next to him in the darkness. It gives him a sense of security, I guess, to know there's another beating heart in the bed.

“Come on,” says Marilee. “I know he loved his mama and I mean no disrespect, but we can't walk around quiet as a funeral for twenty-four straight hours. This is getting foolish and I'm getting hungry.”

So she and I turn on every light in the kitchen and fix ourselves bowls of cereal and then we carry them down to the jungle room along with our guitars. We're playing softly, just working on something new like we sometimes do, and despite the fact it's nearly ten at night—usually about the time Graceland's getting into full swing—there doesn't seem to be anyone else downstairs.

The jungle room is my favorite place in Graceland. The walls and even the ceiling are carpeted in green, so it's like hiding away in a cave. It reminds me of home. Not that my daddy's house had tiki gods and waterfalls, a thought that makes me laugh, but because the mossy green is like the woods where I used to roam as a kid. There are animal statues everywhere and
those big, woven, high-backed chairs that look like thrones—all as a tribute to Hawaii.

It was the scene of his greatest triumph. When the
Aloha from Hawaii
special aired four years ago it was the highest rated television show of all time. More people saw Elvis singing that night than saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, and I remember just where I'd been, at home in the den, staying up late with Daddy and Mama. Ordinarily they weren't much for what Daddy called “that pop pop music.” He took his reputation within the congregation too seriously for that. But Elvis was an exception. He openly declared his faith in Jesus and was southern, with old-fashioned manners. Maybe he wasn't the perfect role model because everybody remembered him swiveling his hips in that jail-cell movie, but I guess Daddy figured that if I had to listen to some sort of pop pop, Elvis was our best bet. So when
Aloha from Hawaii
came on, I was allowed to stay up and watch the whole thing. I'd sat there on the couch in my pajamas with a big bowl of ice cream in my lap and I'd been transfixed. It was the most glamorous thing I'd ever seen.

“You're not paying attention,” Marilee is saying to me now, resting her cheek against the neck of her guitar. “Where's that mind gone?”

“Wandering,” I admit. There's never any point in lying to Marilee.

She's been humming some little scrap of melody over and over. It sounds good. Because of the carpet on the walls, the jungle room has great acoustics, and we've recorded here more than once. Some people say it gives better sound than our actual high-dollar studio out back. I move to pick up my guitar
and join her, and just in that second, I look up and see Elvis standing in the doorway.

We're caught. He's come down the back staircase and caught us.

I don't know why I'd say it like that. All of us girls have free run of the mansion, or at least the part downstairs, but still when we look up and see him just standing there in his light blue bathrobe, not saying a word, me and Marilee both freeze like we're doing something forbidden.

Maybe we were. We were making music at Graceland without Elvis.

But all he says is, “Play that last part again.”

So we play it for him, as much as we have, and after a couple of times through, he starts to sing along. He's in a strange mood tonight, gentle and shy, as if those hours in the dark have sucked the swagger right out of him. At some point he goes to get his own guitar and tells Marilee to set up a microphone.

And then we record, just a little bit. First of him singing with me and her on backup, and then trying out different combinations of melody and harmony.

“The words need to say he's looking into the water,” Elvis says. “Nothing's any sadder than a man looking into the water.”

“We gotta be careful how we phrase it,” I say. “Nothing rhymes with water.”

“Daughter,” says Marilee.

I'm shaking my head but Elvis is nodding his. “There you go,” he says. “Daughter can be a sad word too.”

So we've got
water
and
daughter
in the first two lines, despite my reservations about both of them, and if you had told
me four years ago, on that night I sat on my daddy's couch with a bowl of ice cream, that I'd be jamming in the jungle room with Elvis Presley, I think the top of my head would have flown off.

At some point the clock chimes. Twelve low bells. Midnight. It's August 15. The day of death has come and gone and the heart of Elvis Presley still beats. I look at Marilee and she looks back, her eyes wide and solemn. Only Elvis seems unaware of the time. He is hunched over his guitar, his face as sweet as a child's.

Remember this,
I think, moving my head side to side as if I were a camera trying to take in the scene from every angle. Elvis on the stool with his guitar. Marilee fiddling with the recorder. Me with my legs crossed Indian style, scribbling lyrics onto a yellow legal pad.
Remember everything about this night,
I think.
Because you will never be this happy again.

CORY

June 3, 2015

I
bought one of those disposable phones back in Tupelo, specifically so I could leave the number with Express Paternity. Even so, I'm startled when it buzzes and it takes me a second to dig it out of the passenger seat, where it's slipped below Lucy's shredded chew toy and the jar of honey. I've just come into the outskirts of Memphis, and I'm in what Bradley would call “not the good part of town.” But the sign on the interstate swore up and down that this was the Graceland exit, and based on the street numbers I think I'm almost to the airport La Quinta where Lucy and I will be spending the night. I fumble for the phone.

“Miss Ainsworth?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that's me. Are the tests done already?”

“You said you wanted them today, didn't you? That was . . . that was our agreement?”

“Right.” I feel suddenly flushed and dizzy, and ever since the phone first buzzed, I've been looking for a place to pull
off the road. It normally costs $179 to have DNA tests run at Express Paternity, but as the young male nurse had been drawing my blood I'd asked him if they could put the double rush on it for $250. He'd hesitated, turned away for just a split second, and I had panicked like I always do and said, “Or how about $300?” I suck at negotiating. I think he'd only been looking out the door to make sure his boss didn't hear our conversation, and then I'd gone and flown off the handle and offered up damn near every dime David Beth had just given me.

But maybe that's fitting, who can say. Maybe it's nothing more than Express Paternity karma. And either way, this kid was as good as his word, because here it is barely two hours after he drew my blood, and he's already calling me. I find a strip center and whip the car in. It's the kind of place that has a check-­cashing service and a tattoo parlor and a Ho Ho Chinese takeout and three empty storefronts. I make sure all the doors are locked before I cut off the engine.

“The DNA was collected from the toothbrush and the razor match,” the nurse begins. “We couldn't do anything with the earwax from the Q-tip. But the saliva and the hair are clearly from the same person.”

No big surprise there. “And?”

“We can say to a degree of ninety-nine percent certainty that these samples come from your biological father.”

“Ninety-nine percent?”

“They won't let us say a hundred.”

“So ninety-nine means a hundred?”

“I guess it does.”

I look down at my hands on the steering wheel.
I'm half Jewish,
I think out of nowhere, and even though I was expecting exactly this, the world still swims before my eyes.

“And the blood on the tissue paper,” the young man's voice continues, “is a match as well.”

“What do you mean ‘the tissue paper'?”

“The Kleenex.”

“What?” The world snaps back into focus. “That's not possible. Those samples came from completely different places. They were collected years apart.”

“I don't mean the blood on the tissue matched the saliva and hair samples,” the voice hastens to explain, although I'm having trouble hearing him, for I truly must be near the airport. A jet roars overhead as he speaks, coming in low for a landing, and the Blackhawk shudders in response. “I mean that they match your own blood.”

“I'm not following you,” I practically shout into the phone. “Say it again?”

“The hair and the saliva are a match to you,” he says. “And the blood on the Kleenex is a match to you as well.”

“How can two different people be my father?”

“They can't,” he says with a little giggle. “Two different people can't be your father, but two different people can be your parents. That's why you're a DNA match for both samples.”

I still can't seem to understand what he's saying. How can Graceland be near here? This whole part of Memphis is so ugly and loud. It's like the whole world is roaring. From the backseat Lucy begins to whine, as if even he knows that sitting still in
this particular parking lot is a bad idea. “So what you're telling me . . .”

“What I'm telling you is that the saliva and the hair came from your father,” says the voice on the phone. “And the blood on the tissue came from your mother.”