Last Ride to Graceland (27 page)

“If this is really Elvis—” Fred says, but I cut him off.

“If you've got the slightest doubt,” I say, “we can get into this car right now and listen to the tape. You'll know if it's legitimate. A thousand impersonators couldn't fool his old tour manager now, could they?”

He's tempted, tempted by the chance to hear, even for a few mangled seconds, the sounds of Elvis crooning in the jungle room. I hold out the keys to him.

“All right,” Fred says. “You and me. You and me only.” He jerks his head toward Dirk. “You hold that damn dog out here. He's not getting into Elvis's car.”

It's sort of a ridiculous order in light of the fact this damn dog has been in Elvis's car for the last thousand miles, but I see he's just trying to reestablish in everybody's eyes that he's the one calling the shots here. That he's not going to let some halfwit bar singer from South Carolina and her coonhound and even his own son join forces to sass him. I can tell from the way Dirk's finessing him that Fred hasn't had any real power here at Graceland for a long time. That he's pretty much rattling around like a relic of the old days, with a title like “authenticator” that doesn't mean squat, and that's okay. Let this little man be a big man. Let him sputter and spit and make declarations. Because after he's had time to think about it, he'll see the genius of Dirk's plan. How it will behoove Graceland as well as me.

I hold out the keys. “You want to crank it?”

As he reaches for them, a bolt of static electricity passes from his fingers to mine, enough so that that both of us jump. I step back and run my hand over the chassis a final time, letting
my palm drag the length of the flank of the car.
You've been wrapped away all this time,
I think,
waiting for something. The chance to go home, maybe, or some kind of release. And I hope I gave it to you. 'Cause
God knows you gave it to me.

Even Lucy has caught the sentimental mood. He sniffs the back left tire of the Blackhawk, then lifts his leg and pees good-bye all over it.

And with that, we're done.

HONEY

I
'm standing in the kitchen, debating whether or not to go upstairs and at least try and sleep when I hear Elvis pick up the phone. From the way he's talking, I can tell he's asking for David. I don't know why he'd be wanting to practice karate now, at three in the morning, when he's all sore from dental work, or why he'd be asking David to come up to the house instead of meeting him in the studio.

But it's clear soon enough. Elvis isn't in the mood to kick. He's in the mood to talk. Talk and eat. Because in the next instant he calls the cook and pretty soon David's burst in the door, clearly awakened from a deep sleep, and the three of them are huddled in the kitchen. Pans are rattling and water is running. David has come with an armful of his philosophy and religion books and has spread them across the counter.

As for me, I'm lurking in the hall outside the kitchen, waiting for the moment when Elvis and Wanda are distracted and I can wave at David. He and Elvis are sitting at bar stools, with
their books and papers spread out all around them like two teenage boys doing homework. Wanda's moved to the stove and started frying something. She has two pans going—one for each man—because none of the rest of us can quite stomach the volume of grease and sugar that Elvis casually consumes on a daily basis. I don't know what she's cooking for David; an egg, or a hamburger patty most likely, or something equally simple. Elvis is having his standard fried banana and peanut butter sandwich. No bacon this time, or at least I can't smell any. I guess all that dental work must have put him off anything hard.

It takes awhile, but I finally get my moment. Elvis stands up and goes over to Wanda, mumbling something to her, poking at the contents of the fry pan. I hiss, just like a character in a cartoon, and David looks up from his books.

He smiles. He thinks I'm was calling him out into the hall to set a time for a tryst later—or at least for a kiss. He has no idea he's about to be confronted by a madwoman with a test tube of urine in her hand.

But when I pull it out, his face changes in a second. It would seem that, just like Elvis, he can recognize an EPT test kit at twenty paces.

“How could this have happened?” he whispers before I can even get the words out. “I thought you said you took care of it.”

I try to sputter out my story but he cuts me off.

“Never mind,” he says. “I guess that is my fault as well as yours. But you're going to take care of it now, right?”

And in that one sentence he tells me everything I need to know. I said
baby
and he said
it,
and even though I'm not surprised by his attitude, I still weave a little on my feet.

“Wait downstairs,” David says, and he is concerned enough to reach out and grab my arm, to give me a brotherly peck on the cheek. “We can talk later. Right now, I've got to be here for Elvis. We're talking about the true face of God.”

I shake his hand off my arm. “So duty calls.”

He nods. “Exactly.” Sarcasm is totally lost on the boy. Always had been, always will be.

I wrap the EPT in toilet paper and dump it into the trash can of the downstairs bathroom and then go down to the jungle room to wait. I curl up on one of the couches and cover myself with a leopard-skin blanket, even though I don't think I'll sleep. With my mind racing like this, I don't think I have a prayer of sleeping, but I guess I do, because I suddenly feel myself jerk. That feeling you have, like you're falling from a tree.

Somebody is screaming.

You hear a lot of sounds at Graceland. Gunshots and gospel. The roaring engines of go-carts and the girlish giggles of Lisa Marie and her friends. But I've never heard anybody scream, at least not like this. It's high-pitched and shrill and desperate. I struggle to sit up, tangled in the leopard-skin blanket and hoping that I'm dreaming.

I'm not. The scream has come from right above me, and I move toward it without thinking. It's a preacher's daughter impulse, bred in me from birth, to automatically move toward trouble when any sensible person would move away from it. But I'm on my feet and running now, past the empty kitchen and up the wood-paneled staircase. It's so dark that I stumble more than once, banging my knee and finally emerging into the upstairs hall that leads to Elvis's bedroom. I look both ways, feel
ing lost. It sounds crazy, to say you're lost in a house you've lived in for over a year, but I had only been past these double doors once or twice. I must have been on some sort of errand, taking something to or from Elvis, and for a moment I'm turned around, still in that stumbly dream state.

Another scream sets me right. It lets me know which way to run, through another set of double doors, these already thrown open, and toward Elvis's bedroom.

I burst in and see that it is already full of people. Whatever is happening is happening fast. Ginger is the one screaming. She's shrieking with every breath in her body and somebody, one of the audio boys I've seen but whose name I can't remember, catches my eye and whispers, “She's the one who found him.”

Found him?

As crowded as the room is, the action is focused somewhere else, at the door of the bathroom. Four or five people are clustered there, but then somebody moves and I can see halfway inside, enough to see a man's feet stretched out on the floor.

Marilee is here. She claps her hand on my shoulder and spins me around to face her. Her mouth is trembling. Marilee is the calmest person I've ever met. She moves through the world acting like God himself has already told her what's going to happen next. Like she's living her life in a circle or maybe even backward and she's immune to fear, or even surprise. But now her lips and her eyes are wide and her fingers claw at the air as she's struggling to get the words out.

“Fred wants us to get him out of here,” she finally manages to say.

Wants us to get him out of here? It's another phrase that doesn't seem to make any sense. Elvis is sick, that much is clear. Somebody has called for an ambulance. I know that because everyone keeps saying to one another, over and over, “the ambulance is coming.” Elvis's father is wailing. His daughter is moving through the room like a sleepwalker.

They shouldn't be here,
I think.
Somebody needs to get hold of the situation and get Vernon and Lisa Marie out of here.

“Come on,” Marilee says. “If we work together, we can carry him.” Her voice is barely a whisper. With all the hollering and running and the pounding sounds coming from the bathroom, I have to lean toward her to hear what she's saying. Even then it doesn't make any sense. Fred wants me and Marilee to carry Elvis downstairs to wait for the ambulance? Won't the rescue guys come up the stairs to Elvis, with their stretchers and IVs and cardiac machines? I think of him earlier that night, bobbing his head in time to the eight-track, smiling. Holding the test tube out to me, his face serious this time, and kind and wise and tired. Bending down over the frying pan to sniff whatever it was that Wanda was making.

“Did Elvis faint?” I ask Marilee. It is all I can think of to say. He must have fainted. Maybe hit his head when he fell. There are so many things a person can hit their head on in a bathroom.

“Elvis is dead, Honey,” she says. She almost shouts it and, loud as the room is, several people turn toward her, all shaking their heads and frowning. She is the first to speak the D-word. No one must speak the D-word. To speak it aloud is to call the possibility into being, to practically invite the roof of Graceland to collapse down upon our heads.

And then Marilee steps aside and for the first time I understand what she means, who she has been whispering and yelling about all along. Behind her, crumpled in a light blue velvet chair, is David.

David. What was he doing here, at the end of this long hall, in the bedroom Elvis shares with Ginger? And how can he be dead when just an hour earlier he was telling me I needed to take care of something? Perhaps I should be the one screaming and crying now. From the bathroom I hear Elvis's daddy wailing, “Don't leave me, son . . . Don't leave me,” and the entire room flinches at the sound. One of the other backup singers, a girl from Detroit we call Lou Lou, finally has the sense to latch onto Lisa Marie's hand and pull her out of the room. A man says to me and Marilee, “Where's that fucking ambulance?” and we both shake our heads.

David is dead?

How can he be dead?

I turn toward him and study his body, folded in on itself, like he's assumed the crash position in an airplane. His hands dangle down by his feet, and his head is utterly limp. I start to drop to my knees, to try to reason with him. Because it seems that he's being so utterly unreasonable, just sitting here like this, staying so still and silent while the world is falling apart around our ears. But then Fred is by my side, and, numb as I am, I find myself nodding as he spits out orders into my ear, willing to agree to anything he asks of me. I'm just relieved that someone, somewhere, seems to have a plan.

“You've got to get him out of here,” Fred says, patting Da
vid's shoulders with both of his hands. “One can be explained as an accident, but two . . .”

And he's right. Trust Fred to be the only one who is thinking ahead, already trying to guard the reputation of the man who is either dead or dying in the bathroom, the reputation of the entire house of Graceland. If the body is found in a bathroom, there can be any number of plausible explanations. It can be an accident. A medical emergency. Elvis had a heart attack. Yes, it's his heart. He went just like his mother went, and weren't we all more or less expecting it? It's the most likely and easily accepted cause of death.

But if you have another dead body, curled up and waiting not twenty feet from the first? There's no way of calling that an accident. Now you're heading down the slippery slope of “foul play.” You're inviting the doctors and policemen—who must surely be here any minute, because it feels like we've been in this room for a lifetime—to start looking for an explanation of what could have possibly killed two men at once.

Fred hands Marilee a white plastic bag. She takes it, without saying anything or looking inside. Then Fred turns back to David. “Steady, Nunchucks,” he says, and for the first time my heart lurches. I've been watching all this like it was a show on TV, happening to somebody else, half expecting that any moment Elvis will pick up his gun and blow the screen out, save us all from having to watch this stupid, unbelievable story. But when Fred said “Nunchucks,” calling David by that awful nickname, my heart twisted in my chest.

Fred reaches under David's armpits. He's hopped up on adrenaline, but it's still not going to work. Fred's too frail for the
task at hand. A middle-aged tour manager who goes a buck thirty dripping wet is not going to be able to move the body of a young karate instructor. If anything he's only going to knock him over and make him harder to lift. Marilee seems to be having the same thought, because in an instant she's moving to help Fred, pushing the white plastic bag into my hands. I glance down into it. Vials of pills. Maybe twenty bottles, maybe five hundred pills.

I guess we're supposed to get these out of here along with the body of David.

And as for David, he has just rolled to the floor. He is splayed out on his back, arms flung wide, staring at the ceiling, and Marilee and Fred are arguing with each other about who's to blame. As they are yelling about who should have grabbed him where, I see a foamy little river of slime begin to ooze out of David's lips.

“He's alive,” I say.

Marilee and Fred both look at me. Then they both look at the bathroom door as if hoping against hope that I'm talking about Elvis. As if the King has somehow gotten to his feet and is coming out of the bathroom saying, “Well, I'll tell y'all that was a close one.”

But no, of course the person who is alive is David. The fall to the floor, the thud to his back, seems to have shocked him back into life. It must have forced some of the poison up his throat and onto his mouth and cheeks.

“Shit,” says Fred. “Goddamn it and shit.” I guess Nunchucks half alive requires as many explanations to the authorities as Nunchucks dead.

“We should move him down the back stairs,” I say. “The ambulance people will come up the front.”

“Should we let them take him to the hospital?” Marilee asks. “Pump his stomach maybe?”

“Hell no,” says Fred. “At least not a hospital in Memphis. What we need is a car.”

“I have a car,” I say. Marilee and Fred look at me like I'm speaking Greek. “The Blackhawk. We can take him in that.”

And so I tie the loop of the white plastic bag to my belt buckle and the three of us working together manage to get David off the floor. Fred takes his head and Marilee and I each take a leg and we start toward the hall and no one makes any particular note of us or even asks us what we're doing. The center of the world is still the motionless body of Elvis, except for a few people who are going around opening drawers and checking out counters, trying to find any pills Fred might have missed in his earlier sweep. The truth is now slowly dawning on the faces of at least half the people in the room. Their focus is changing from saving Elvis the man to saving Elvis the idea. So no one says anything as Marilee and Fred and I bump our way through the door and down the hall to the back staircase. We're trying to hurry and we're rough. David's head gets whacked more than once. We lose one of his shoes. He throws up again halfway down the stairs, starts to choke on it, and we just twist him over like a dishrag, taking care not to step in the vomit as we continue.

The stairs let out near the kitchen and Marilee and I both freeze. Lisa Marie is in there, with Lou Lou and Wanda, but Lou Lou is turned toward the staircase and sees us coming
around with David's limp body. Not a sight the little girl needs to witness with so much else going on, but evidently they're making a milkshake, so Lou Lou thinks real smoothly and cuts the blender on. The noise covers up our thuds and groans as we get David out of the stairwell and down the hall leading to the garage.