Last Ride to Graceland (28 page)

The Blackhawk is waiting in the driveway, exactly where I left it. We pile David into the back. I turn toward Marilee but she's still shaking.

“I'll drive,” I say, and Marilee nods. For once, Fred doesn't have anything to add. He doesn't say good-bye or good luck or give us any last-minute instructions or scold us for something that happened yesterday, or the day before that. As I seesaw the Blackhawk around and head toward the gate, I see him lean against the wall of the garage, looking like a man who's had the fight knocked clean out of him.

The sky is barely starting to lighten as we move down the driveway. A crowd is already gathered on the far side of the gate. Three times the number of reporters you'd normally find on a random weekday in August.

They know something's up,
I think.
How? The ambulance isn't even here yet but the vultures are already descending.

“They listen to police scanners,” Marilee says tonelessly, as if she'd heard my unspoken question. “Always tuning in hoping to hear trouble. And they got it today, didn't they? Got it in spades.”

I pull onto the main road without slowing, almost enjoying the sight of the reporters scattering, diving this way and that to avoid the strong curved bumpers of the Blackhawk, cursing at
us and pounding the sides of the car as I roll out. And almost immediately after I'm through the gates I see them coming, a whole string of ambulances roaring down the highway, with police cars and a fire truck to boot. A dozen sirens screaming, all bearing down on Graceland.

Marilee and I talk briefly as I drive. She gets a map from the glove compartment, spreads it across her lap, and manages to direct me through town and to the river. Early as it is, traffic is picking up with people starting to work, so we pull down to one of the landings where they let the boats in. I position the car beside the bank and stomp on the emergency brake. We seem to be having a real run of bad luck, we three people in this Blackhawk. It wouldn't do to top it off by having us all roll into the Mississippi.

“I'm sorry,” Marilee says. “My legs are gone to rubber. You're gonna have to do it.”

“Do you think we can get in trouble for this?”

She barks out a little laugh. An angry laugh. “Can we get in trouble for this? Well, I ask you, Honey Berry, what do you think?”

I yank the bag from my belt, tearing the top in the gesture, and glance into the backseat as I get out of the car. David's head is resting against a child's blue plush toy, the one that got the blue hairs on my white pants last night on our drive to the dentist. I didn't see it in the darkness, not then, and it's a pathetic droopy little thing here in the growing light of morning.

For some reason I reach back and pull it out too. David's head bumps against the side of the car and he moans. I don't know why I'd do such a thing, if I'm so mad that I want to deny
David even the comfort of his little bear pillow or if doesn't seem right for him to be drooling on a carnival prize Elvis had won for Lisa Marie, or if my rattled mind is just viewing everything in sight as evidence. Evidence for some crime that doesn't yet have a name.

But I grab the toy and stand up out of the car, looking down at my white pants as I do. Not a great traveling outfit, but we peeled out of Graceland without any clothes or money or even our purses. I don't have my driver's license or my gas credit card or a change of underwear. All I have is this car and a sack full of incriminating drugs and Marilee and David, neither of whom seems remotely inclined to help me sort this all out. I've picked a hell of a time to become the person in charge.

I walk over to one of the little docks. Stretch to look up and all around me, but I don't see anyone. The cars are driving steadily by on the bridge overhead, not a one of them slowing down to take notice of the Blackhawk or the people riding in it. The water before me is dark and deep. It's as good a place as anywhere to hide your sins, I guess, and I open the white plastic bag. Shake out the bottles one by one, and watch them plop in the water below.

All that's left is the furry blue animal lying at my feet on the dock. At first I thought it was a bear, but as I stoop to pick it up, I see that it's a hound dog. It looks up at me, all mournful eyes and floppy ears, and I guess that's why Elvis asked the carnie for this toy in particular, because hound dogs had always been good luck for him. “Hound Dog” was his first number one hit. The start of what made him Elvis.

Marilee honks the horn. She's wondering what's taking me
so long. I look up at the sky, at this day that's coming straight at me, no matter how hard I try and stop it. Coming at all of us, splitting time in half, so that no matter what happens after this, we'll only see our lives in terms of before Elvis died and after, dividing our world just as neatly as the Mississippi divides this town. Just as neatly as the Mississippi divides this country, this world.

Marilee has rolled down the window. “Hurry up,” she yells. “We gotta get going.”

“I know,” I say. “I'm coming.” Then I throw the dog into the water too.

CORY

I
'm standing looking down into the rolling water of the Mississippi when the phone rings. I jump, startled. Funny how fast you can get used to the silence, to life without a phone or computer. It takes me a few minutes of digging around my backpack to even find the damn thing. I'd been working on the lyrics of the song, and the steady roar of the river had me nearly hypnotized. It reminds me of the sound of the bay back in Fairhope.

It's Dirk, of course. He dropped me and Lucy off here by the docks maybe an hour earlier, because I told him I wanted to explore the city and think about Fred's offer. It's a good offer, I know. As good as a girl like me is ever going to get in this world, and yet I'm hesitant. Maybe it's because the song isn't finished. It doesn't feel right signing the paperwork before the lyrics are done.

It's hard to hear Dirk over the hum of the river. He has to say it three times before I grasp what he's called to tell me. Some man claiming to be my father has tracked me down, he
says. He called Graceland no more than five minutes after I left. Told them he'd driven all the way to Memphis to fetch me home.

“What'd you tell him?” I yell.

“I didn't say shit,” says Dirk, who's rapidly moving into the category of Best Damn Friend I Ever Had. “Why would I? I figured it was up to you to tell him what, if anything, you thought he needed to know. But he said to tell you he'd be waiting at the Smokin' Pig for lunch at one. It's at the end of Beale Street. Do you feel like going?”

“Yeah. I'll go.”

“Want me to come get you?”

“No, it isn't far. I'll walk.”

“Girl, you got them waders with you, and that guitar and that dog. Let me come for you in the car and take you there proper. So you step out like a lady. Like a lady who has the world by the ass.”

“I can walk,” I say. The Graceland Security squad car always caused too much of a fuss for my taste, and besides, I wasn't more than a handful of blocks from Beale and I'd intended to walk it anyway. It's the music street of Memphis and I've never been there. I tell Dirk good-bye and look down at the phone. It's not quite noon, so I have plenty of time, and I'd like to stand here a minute longer, looking down into this dark water, watching it flow, and waiting for the words to come.

I think of Mama, think of why she put the word
daughter
in the lyrics when she always said she thought I was a boy right up to the moment I popped out into the world, looked her right in the eye, and proved her wrong. Besides, there's a lot more words
that rhyme with
son
than with
daughter
, which pretty much tops out at
slaughter
, unless you slur the word as Marilee suggests and make it sound like
water
. I keep murmuring options to myself and my mind drifts back to one night we were out at the lake house and Mama and I had been sitting out under the stars, looking up. She knew a little something about astronomy. She could always find the Dippers and the North Star, and that night she pointed to Venus. I never could see it, but I told her I could and then I asked her for a ghost story.

Mama wasn't much for ghosts. She didn't like Halloween or scary movies, and she wouldn't let me read Stephen King, even though all my friends did. But on that particular night she reached over and stroked my hair and told me that somewhere on Earth—she didn't know where, but somewhere—there was another little girl who looked just like me. Who walked like me and talked like me, even though she was living somewhere else. Somewhere far away, with a whole other life. She was my double, Mama said, and everybody's got one. When I wake up in the morning, that other little girl was lying down to go to sleep at night and when she woke up . . . well, you get the idea. It made me sad to think of having a double somewhere out there. The Cory Beth I couldn't see, living with some other mama and daddy.

I said, “What happens if I find her one day? What happens if I walk past her on the street?”

And Mama said, quick and flat as a river, “Well, then one of you will just have to die.”

She could be like that sometimes. Weird and weirdly mean, thinking the kind of thoughts no one else ever thinks, and I
burst out crying because I knew I was going to have to spend my whole life scared that someday I'd accidentally meet the other Cory Beth. That I'd pass myself in some airport and then I'd just clutch my chest and drop dead on the spot.

I guess now that I've taken this long drive I understand her a little bit better. Or at least I know a little more of what she meant. She was trying to tell me that we all have a lost twin out there in the world, some part of ourselves that's broken off and gone in another direction. And we're haunted by it. We feel an absence and it pains us, like a Civil War soldier who's lost a leg. It's everyone's personal ghost story, this sense that we're only half here, but we also know that if we ever find and reclaim that lost part, that the cost will be the death of every­thing we are now. It's harsh and it's dark, but I guess it's also sort of true. I try not to think too hard about the Cory who's going to have to die to let this new Cory be born into the world.

I pick up the pieces of my present life, including the leash of my dog, and turn away from the river. Start back in the direction of Beale Street and whatever waits for me when I finally reach the end.

The day
is up and bright and by some counts even half over, but Beale Street is still lying like a whore in the mess of last night. I pick my way through the orange rinds and cherry stems, the crushed beer cups and the pork ribs sucked bare of their meat and scattered around like evidence in a crime scene. Lucy is interested in all of it and I let him have a bone, even though every
body says they splinter. But that dog just isn't going to walk until he has a bone in his mouth, and even then he picks it up wrong, idiotic creature that he is. He carries it back to front instead of side to side, with the end of the bone sticking out of his mouth like a big broken tooth.

It's early, but there's music. People are set up and singing in almost every bar. I can hear them as I pass, and most of them are good. Damn good. The bar doors are open. Sunlight is spilling into the buildings, and the blues are spilling out, and every now and then I pass an alley with picnic tables and an open bar and a little stage. I can't believe this many people are playing this early, before the world's even had the chance to get drunk, but they're here. All with their dreams and most of them knowing that those dreams are going to get dashed. Nobody understands the odds better than me, and yet I'm humming as I go, picking up a piece of a song on one corner and then a piece of another on the next, walking through zones of music, the debaucheries of the night before squishing beneath my shoes, forming part of the beat, and the hot southern sun on my face.

And then I see him. He's sitting outside at one of the picnic tables, waiting for me, just like he always has been. At the edge of every softball field and stage and high school parking lot, there that man has been, sitting and biding his time. He smiles and waves. Waves hard, as if there's a chance I might get confused and walk on by him, and then he frowns a little bit, seeing that I've got his waders and this crazy-ass coonhound, who's now dropped the bone and picked up a corn dog and is eating it, stick and all.

I pull up beside him, drop the backpack on the picnic table, and put down his waders and my guitar.

“Hey, Daddy,” I say.

Bradley says
he's driven straight through from Florida in his pickup truck. It seems he called Gerry on Saturday, and Gerry told him I'd come in for my check then disappeared, which was all Gerry knew. But then he called Leary and Leary had broken like an eggshell. Spit out the whole story of how I'd taken off heading west on four bald tires with no money.

“I didn't plan this too well,” Bradley says, reaching down to scratch Lucy behind the ears. I've looped his leash around the leg of the picnic table.

“You planned it? It's hard to believe anybody planned anything about this at all.”

“It's not a bad trip, you know. Straight north from Sarasota, till you get around Charlotte, then hang a left. Interstate the whole way, north and west. It's boring, but it's fast.”

I try to do the math in my head. He left two days after me and still just about beat me to Memphis. He looks exhausted. His eyes are red and he's got stubble on his chin.

“I thought you'd end up here,” he says. “On Beale Street. It seems like your kind of place.”

The waitress comes up. There's no menu—in fact, I'm not even sure which of the four or five restaurants crammed on this corner lay claim to this picnic table. But it doesn't matter, because the only real question is pulled or sliced, so Bradley and I order our barbecue and sit back. The break, brief as it was,
seems to have pushed him back down into himself a little bit and given him confidence, because he finally looks at me straight on and comes to the point.

“I made a mistake thirty-seven years ago, Cory Beth.”

“Claiming me, you mean.”

“That's what you think? You think I drove a thousand miles to tell you that?” He takes off his ball cap and fans his face. “No, claiming you was one of my best moves. But when your mama came back from Memphis she . . . she tried to tell me what happened to her at Graceland. All the ways she'd been changed, and I shushed her. I couldn't stand to hear it. Here she'd been out into the big world and I was afraid she'd think of me as small. See me as a small man.”

There's silence. He waits, like he's expecting me to say something. Maybe make some stupid joke about Honey being five feet and him being six, and just a few days ago I might have said just that. I might have rushed in with something silly just to give us a way to break the tension. But the road has taught me that sometimes the smartest thing you can do is just shut up and listen. People want to tell you their truth and they'll do it, if you give them half a chance.

Bradley sighs, begins again. “I told Laura that none of that stuff had ever happened. I erased it, don't you see? I erased a part of her life. We hid the car. Wrapped it up and both acted like we'd forgotten it existed. I think I was a bad husband . . .”

Now that's too much. I hear myself speak. “Come on, Bradley, you were a good husband. The best. You loved Mama.”

“Cory Beth, there's more to being a good husband than loving a woman. Loving a woman is the easy part. The hard part is
seeing her as she really is and letting her be all those things, even the ones that are not particularly convenient. So I pretended there wasn't anything more to Laura than the girl who'd climbed on the bus to Memphis after graduation, and I think we were all the worse for the deception.” He looks at me evenly. “I think we hurt you.”

“You think that's why I grew up rootless and feckless. A loser.”

“You're not a loser. Don't you ever say such a thing again. You're not too old for a whipping.”

I'm already shaking my head. “Don't think Mama didn't play along with all your secrets. It wasn't like she was in love with the truth. Not any more than you were. Maybe less.”

“The truth?” Bradley says quietly. “Now I'm not sure about that. The truth's a hard ball to throw and a hard ball to catch.”

The waitress is back. She plops two iced teas in front of us and puts a bowl of water down on the ground for Lucy. He's been awful still and quiet.

“Laura and I only really fought about one thing during our whole marriage,” Bradley says. “And that was about how much to tell you.”

“Whether or not to tell me you weren't my blood daddy.”

“Oh, you knew I wasn't. You figured it out for yourself soon enough, didn't you? When you had to draw that family tree in fifth grade or whatever it was? I remember it plain as day, you sitting at the kitchen table, getting all the dates lined up. Doing the math and frowning. You were looking up at me and then Laura and both of us holding our breath, waiting for you to say something. But you never did.”

“I was a kid. I wasn't totally sure what it meant.”

“But you figured it out eventually and you still didn't come asking. No, when I say the truth, I don't mean that I'm not your biological father, but that I wasn't sure who it was. Neither was Laura. That's as far as I let her get with her story. She said there were two men and I put my hand over her mouth and we never discussed it again. I felt bad about it. Just 'cause I couldn't stand to know didn't mean you couldn't.”

“Then why'd you set the cops on me?”

He takes a sip of sweet tea. “I didn't set the cops on you, or at least I didn't see it that way. I reported you as missing, which is exactly what you were. When Leary told me you took off with the car in that condition, I just about lost my mind with worry. He convinced me to give you two days to get to Memphis, but when two days came and went and you still hadn't shown up . . .”

“I took a circular route.”

He looks at me cautiously, like he's afraid to ask the next question, even though he knows he has to. “And did you,” he finally says, “find what you were looking for?”

“No,” I say. “I found something else entirely. I thought I'd been looking for my daddy, but it turns out what I found was my mama. Parts of her, at least. I think she was a complicated woman.”

He snorts. “You got that part right. There were rooms inside that woman that nobody ever saw.”

But I'm still trying to sort it all out. “So you're the one who called everybody, told them I'd be coming.”

“I called everybody in your mama's book. She'd looked up a
few people up near the end, you know. I guess she wanted to make her farewells.”

“And you told them to help me?”