Last Ride to Graceland (25 page)

HONEY

August 16, 1977

M
y hand is shaking as I lift the dropper to the mouth of the test tube. One, two, three . . . four. The last drop is reluctant to fall. It dangles at the tip until I give it a gentle flick, and finally it releases and plops into the tube with the others.

I use the funnel that came with the kit to add in the second mixture. It's so clear that it looks like nothing more than regular water and it turns the contents of the test tube from gold to pale yellow. I read the rest of the instructions quickly. Something about sheep's blood and hormones and dark floating circles and reflections in mirrors. The whole thing sounds like voodoo.

They say to agitate the test tube steadily, in a swirling motion, and then after that to let it rest completely still. And so I agitate, first one direction and then the other, and I wedge the tube into the little cardboard slot just like it shows in the picture. Finally, I stand up straight, exhaling for the first time since I began.

Twenty minutes to wait.

It's cruel.

I've set up this whole chemistry set on a plastic table where people are supposed to change their children's diapers. It pulls out of the bathroom wall like a Murphy bed, and I've never seen one quite like it. I guess the fact it's even hanging here is further proof that we're in the most modern office building in all of Memphis, one that offers its clients the latest bells and whistles. There's a picture of a fat, gurgling baby on the part that drops down, and he's looking right at me. In fact, his eyes seem to follow me side to side, like one of those creepy portraits in a haunted house, and I back carefully away from the whole contraption, trying not to consider the irony that I'm setting up an EPT pregnancy test across a baby changing table. The instructions said that something has to settle. I forget what. But something has to settle over the course of the next twenty minutes, and after that a dark brown circle will either form in the bottom of that test tube or it will not.

I don't even know if the four golden drops I measured into the test tube qualify as early morning urine. It's now 1:36 a.m., which by one way of reckoning is early morning, although you could just as easily argue that it's nothing more than late night. But I have to do the test here and now, no matter what time it is. There's no privacy at Graceland.

I slip out of the bathroom stall and go to the ladies' room door. Open it slowly and look across the lobby. No one is there. The doors to both of the examination rooms are still closed.

I could wait in the lobby. Get a magazine and try and distract myself with a
Cosmopolitan
quiz. “What Song Describes
Your Sex Life?” “Are You in Love or Just Faking It?” “Is It Time to Cut Your Hair?”

But instead I turn back and check the test tube, even though I know there's nothing yet there to see. I slide down the wall and sit on the floor, looking up. I am seventeen minutes away from news that will either save me or end me and I suddenly feel nauseous, even though I can't remember the last time I ate. Normally this is where I would try to make up a haiku, just to pass the time, but for some reason I can't seem to think of any words. All I can think is five, four, three, two, one, my mind counting down, just like a rocket launch.

CORY

T
he phone rings while I'm still in Graceland. While I'm standing on the puke-green shag carpet and looking down into the jungle room, as a matter of fact. Dirk says that Fred is prepared to see me now. He says it like I've been granted an audience with the pope or the queen of England.

I'm to take the car to the back, he says. Not even to try to get it through the front gates, which is liable to cause a riot on the spot. Instead he tells me this complicated series of turns that'll lead me back through the service entrance and to a hidden parking lot. I don't tell him that I'm in Graceland right now. I don't tell him I've got nothing to write these complicated instructions down on. I don't tell him that it's a miracle I even felt the phone vibrate, down deep like it is in my pocket and with the headphones on my head, saying something about tiki gods and what they symbolize. I just tell him to give me thirty minutes.

He doesn't like the fact it's going to take me so long to get
there and he makes no bones about it, but I know even thirty minutes is cutting it close. I have to get out of Graceland, catch the shuttle back to the main museum part, and then transfer to the hotel shuttle back, throw my shit in my backpack, get the dog, check out of the La Quinta, get the Blackhawk out of the armored parking lot, and return to Graceland. It's a lot to do, but it's a good thing I have a lot to do, because otherwise I might panic. I've come all this way for just this particular moment, but now that it's finally upon me, I feel numb and blank. I make Dirk give me the instructions to the parking lot round back once again and then I repeat them back to him.

I must sound scared because he tells me to pull myself together. It won't do to show up nervous and uncertain in front of Fred, who Dirk says “jumps on any sign of weakness just like a June bug.”

“Isn't this what your mama and daddy left you?” he says. “Isn't this your chance to get what's coming to you after all these years?”

I nod, even though I know he can't see me. I've stepped away from the crowd to take this phone call. I think it's against the rules to take a phone call in the middle of a Graceland tour, but I don't see a security guard in this particular section and most of the people are on their headsets. I lean against a pine-paneled wall out from the kitchen and my eye falls on a group of photographs. One of Elvis with the whole traveling band behind him, and I guess one of these tiny blobs might even be my mama. Of course, there were lots of traveling bands and backup singers through the years, so it's not likely. Even if this picture did happen to be taken during her singular year at
Graceland, the girls are so small and squeezed together that it's nearly impossible to tell them apart, everybody with the same hair and clothes and eyes. But there's no denying that the picture hanging right beside that one is my daddy. David Beth in his full karate gear, the jacket loosely belted, the hair on his chest peeking out of the top. He is in a pose, his fists balled up, his feet bare, one sole pointed straight at the camera. I guess his expression is meant to be intimidating, but it only looks silly. I bring my face closer to his and stare at him.

“Isn't this what your parents wanted for you?” Dirk repeats when the silence between us has stretched.

“My parents?” I say vaguely.

“What your mama and your daddy planned all along for you,” Dirk says with exasperation. He's beginning to think he's gone out on a limb for a crazy woman. “Wouldn't they tell you to get your full inheritance at last?”

“Better make it more like forty minutes,” I say, and I end the call before he has time to yell.

HONEY

M
arilee is rapping on the bathroom door. I open it.

“What the hell are you doing?” she whispers. “We're waiting. Elvis is ready to go.”

I'm surprised by the
hell
. Marilee never cusses. But of course Elvis never has to wait for anything either, and if he's finished in the dentist chair and ready to go, then by all means the time for going has commenced.

“Just a second,” I whisper back, looking down at my watch. I still have almost ten minutes on the EPT test, but of course that's shot now. “Just give me one second.”

“You got the Vicodin? He asked about the Vicodin.”

“Yeah. Of course I have it.”

She nods, and I shut the door. Go back into the stall and look at my little chemistry kit. Should I throw the pieces away, try to stuff them down into the narrow trash can or just walk out and leave everything as it is for some cleaning crew to find in a couple of hours? I begin to pick the whole thing apart and
for some reason, even though the instructions very specifically said not to rattle the test tube, I decide to take it with me. I wrap the Kleenex around it, blood and all, pull my purse over my other shoulder and head out the door.

Elvis is already at the elevator. He's leaning against the wall, staring up at a perfectly ordinary office building light fixture like it's the second coming of Jesus. His mouth is sagging open. He seems woozy.

“You drive, Honey Bear,” he says. “Miss Marilee's sick.”

I glance at Marilee. She doesn't look sick exactly, but she does look strange. There's something in her that seems washed away and she mumbles something about a cavity, so I guess they drilled on her. She hands me the keys to the Blackhawk, which I take in my left hand because the test tube and the Kleenex are still in my right.

“Get him down and wait under the awning,” I say to Marilee. “I'll fetch the car.”

She nods and presses for the elevator. I start down the staircase beside it, still trying to not jostle the tube even though anybody can see that's a lost cause at this point.

Once down the stairs, I push open the lobby doors and step out into the hot, wet night. There's no one in sight, only a single streetlight out in front of the pharmacy, making the parking lot look like the opening shot in a slasher movie. I used to be scared of the dark, before I came to Graceland and night started to feel more normal than day. My feet against the pavement sound light and fast, like a heartbeat, and I fumble with the key, then slide into the driver's side of the Blackhawk. I put the test tube into the cup holder, even though I know that no ring will
form at the bottom of this test tube filled with urine, not after this much motion. So the EPT will read negative, but not the kind of negative that will give me any peace of mind. My heart sinks with the thought I'm going to have to figure out a way to do this all over again in a couple of days or maybe even take the crosstown bus to Planned Parenthood.

Marliee's legs are a mile long, so I have to adjust the seat, and the rearview mirror too, but then I crank the car and swing around to the front of the building. Elvis comes out leaning on Marilee's arm. She takes him straight to the passenger side and I hop out and flip up the seat to let her crawl in behind me. Elvis settles back, not bothering to fasten his seat belt, putting his head against the red leather and mumbling, “You got the perscription, didn't you?”

He does that sometimes. Mixes up words, like
perscription
for
prescription
, and I've never known him to call a single drug by name. They're all just perscriptions. Maybe it's another one of his superstitions. If you don't name something, you don't give it any power.

I nod and we pull out of the parking lot in silence. I glance at the eight-track player. Our demo tape is still inside of it, and I could offer to play it again, freshen up the memory in everybody's minds. But then again, none of us are at our best. More than an hour in the dental chair has exhausted Elvis, and the hygienist must have done something wicked to Marilee, who has laid her head back in an absolute imitation of Elvis's position. I can see her in the rearview mirror.

I doubt any cop in Memphis would stop the Blackhawk, which is known across the city as Elvis's favorite car, and be
sides, there's hardly anybody on the road to hit. But I'm careful anyway as I drive through town, and when I turn back into the gates of Graceland, there are a few photographers waiting on us, even now. I guess they figured that if the Blackhawk drove out just before midnight, it would have to return eventually, so they stuck around. I feel sorry for them sometimes, although I wouldn't dare say that to anyone else. We're supposed to call them vultures and leeches, to sneer at them for not having anything better to do than stare at us through long lenses. But I wonder about their lives, standing outside Graceland in all kinds of weather, just standing and waiting without the slightest evidence any of it will ever pay off. I take the turn slow and deliberate, both because it would never do to smash up the famous musical fence and the Blackhawk in one fell swoop and—I'm sorry to say—also to give the photographer on the right-hand side of the car a good shot at Elvis.

For he has lifted his head from the seat now. He even manages a halfhearted smile and a floppy little wave at the photographer as we roll by. I stay slow all the way down the driveway and stop short of the garage door, not trusting my ability to actually park the car.

“Damn,” says Elvis. He's drooling from his numbed-up lip and he starts groping for a Kleenex, coming up only with mine. As he pulls it out of the cup holder, the test tube comes with it. He fumbles, almost drops them, and then stops, studying both of the items in his palm with a frown.

The funny thing is, he knows at once what he's looking at. Elvis, who can seem a bit slow sometimes, like self-centered
people often do, lifts the test tube to his line of vision and then turns his gaze quizzically to me.

I'm caught and I know it. Lying or pretending will only make it worse. I flick up my gaze again to the rearview mirror, but Marilee appears to have gone to sleep.

“So you're in trouble, Honey Bear?” he says.

My eyes flood with tears. I shake my head, unable to answer.

Elvis opens the door so that the interior light will come on and holds the test tube up again, higher than his head, looking at the contents from the bottom. Later I will think of what a strange moment in time this was, Elvis squinting up at the test tube, his chin cocked to the side, studying it just like the scientist on the cover of my old high school chemistry book.

“It won't tell you anything,” I say. “You're not supposed to shake the tube and here I've carried it down the stairs and across the parking lot and then driven it all over town rattling away in a cup holder. If the test is positive, a ring forms, but I haven't given the ring a fair chance to form. I've messed it up, so tomorrow—”

I stop. It's the longest speech I've ever made in front of Elvis. Maybe the longest speech I've made since I got to Graceland. But I have to stop, not just because I know I'm running on like a madwoman, but because I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow. I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow or the day after that or the day after that.

Elvis looks at me with sorrowful eyes. Like he knows what's ahead and he hates it, both for himself and for everybody else.

“You went home a few weeks ago, didn't you?” he says ­gently,
crumpling the Kleenex and throwing it back into the cup holder. “Went home to see your mama and your daddy?”

I nod, even though I don't have the slightest idea where he's going with this or how he even remembers the event. My daddy had turned forty and they'd had a party for him at the church and I'd asked Fred, at the last minute, if I could have some time off to go. We'd been touring anyway, were somewhere on the southern swipe between Charlotte and Atlanta, and Fred said yeah, he'd get one of the roadies to drive me to Beaufort just as long as I was back for that night's show.

We made it just in time for the end of the Sunday service. I walked up the steps of the church I'd grown up in—prodigal daughter, returning star. My hair was fixed and my makeup was set and I had on one of the short lace dresses Elvis favored. Just as I got there they were getting ready to bring in the cake and one of the women said, “Oh, let Laura carry it in.”

So the church doors had opened and there I was, carrying a sheet cake with forty candles, walking slow and steady up the aisle like a bride. I'd seen certain people out of my peripheral vision as I'd passed. Mama, of course, and two of my high school friends, already married and done for, and Bradley, even Bradley, although I couldn't quite bring myself to turn my head and look at him.

But it didn't matter. When my daddy had seen me coming toward him he'd said, “Praise Jesus,” and rushed down the aisle toward me and everyone had clapped. I was back in the car an hour later, barreling toward that evening's venue in Atlanta and never having said a word to Bradley Ainsworth at all. I can't think why Elvis would remember such a trifling event. But he's
like that—sometimes aware of nothing and then, in the next breath, aware of everything.

“I went for my daddy's fortieth birthday,” I say. “To his church. He's a preacher.” I don't know why I feel compelled to remind Elvis that I'm a preacher's daughter, but I do.

“That's right,” says Elvis. “And you saw your high school sweetheart while you were home, isn't that right?”

Oh. Okay. So that's what he thinks. I'm still the virgin of Graceland in his eyes. Always have been, always will be, even if I got liquored up and started swinging from the chandeliers. The only way he can reconcile the possibility I might be pregnant with his image of me is to tell himself that when I was home I must have been with my high school sweetheart. It's the sort of truth he can live with—in other words, a truth that isn't true—and he likes it better than he'd like the reality of the situation. The reality that I was already nobody's virgin when I went walking down the aisle of my daddy's Presbyterian church wearing an eggshell-colored lace dress and carrying a cake with forty candles. I'd already lain with Philip Cory, such as that was, and was plotting to lie with my real target, David Beth, the moment we got back to Graceland. My high school sweetheart was nothing more than a face in the crowd, someone I didn't even bother to exchange words with, but I can't tell Elvis all that. In fact, I find myself nodding before he's even finished talking.

“That's right,” I say. “I went back to see my mama and my daddy and my high school sweetheart. Bradley Ainsworth.”

Elvis sighs and looks toward the house. “I won't sleep tonight,” he says.

It's like him. Two minutes of thinking about somebody else
has worn him out and now he's back to thinking about himself. I feel like snapping at him, asking why can't he see what I'm going through, but of course I don't. Instead, I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand and say, “I got something from the doctor.”

“That picayune little shit won't help,” he says, even though there's enough Parafon to drop a horse zipped up in my pocketbook. “I told ya, I'm not gonna sleep tonight.”

Perfect. Just great. We all know what a night at Graceland is like when Elvis doesn't sleep.

We're both still waiting in our car seats, Marilee dozing in the back, the two of us staring toward the house. Elvis's face, when I glance over, is a mask of fear. As much as I know that if he doesn't sleep we're all facing a night of misery, as exasperated as I am with him for switching from my problem to his in half a second, I still feel a trickle of sympathy. He fears going to sleep and he fears being left behind when everyone else goes to asleep, and the result is the situation now before us. A house where nobody is allowed to shut their eyes, where we're all nervous and wakeful, like a bunch of people waiting for bad news that hasn't yet come.

They say that Elvis has a recurring dream, in which he always wakes up alone. The girls who have spent the night tell stories of it, of him sitting up with a gasp, clammy and terrified, his hands reaching for them before his eyes are fully open. Marilee said once it's because his baby brother died when they were both in their mama's belly, that the first thing Elvis ever knew was what it felt like for somebody to go on ahead without him, to leave him behind to face the morning all alone. That
he's carried this sense he was getting ready to be abandoned again, any minute, with him throughout his whole life.

“Is he a good boy, this one you left behind in South Carolina?” Elvis asks me, still looking toward the darkened shell of Graceland.

This conversation is enough to give you whiplash, but I nod. “Yeah. Maybe too good.” I don't add that I'm no longer a good girl and that I suspect Bradley and I could make each other's lives a living hell if fate gave us half a chance to do just that. But it turns out I don't have to say anything else, because Elvis laughs.

“Then you take this car, Honey Bear, and you drive back east as fast and as hard as you can.” He holds out the key. “Make him marry you. From what you say, it won't take much.”

My mind does what it always does when it's surprised. It goes straight to something trivial.

“I can't drive this car to South Carolina,” I say. “How am I supposed to get it back to you?”

He laughs again, a gesture that evidently gives him pain, because he immediately winces and rubs his jaw. “If I give you a car,” he says, “I ain't gonna be calling for it back.”

“But this one's your favorite. Nobody drives the Blackhawk but you.”

“Now that's hardly the truth, is it? Miss Marilee drove it earlier tonight and now here you sit behind the wheel. And looking mighty fine there, if I say so myself.”