Last Ride to Graceland (4 page)

“Why don't we have a beer?”

“All right,” he says, and we both sit down on the bank. He kills his first one in two or three gulps, then starts on the second. It seems to settle him. It's nice out here on the water and I can't think why I hardly ever come. I'm taking it slow and steady with my own beer, because it's occurred to me that I need to start tonight, before I lose my nerve.

“You know, Cory Beth,” Leary says, and then he flops all the way back on the ground of the riverbank and looks up at the sky. “While you were gone, I took my phone and Googled the car, and everything came up the same. Turns out there never was more than a handful of these Blackhawks in the States, and one man collected more of them than anyone else, a man by the name of—”

I lie down too. “Leary, you've got to promise me—”

“Now, I'm not asking you anything and I'm not telling you anything,” he says, and then he rolls over and drains the second beer before reaching for the third. “I'm just saying it would scare me out of my skin to think you were going to try and drive this car to Tennessee. So promise me you're not going to, right?”

“I'm not going to drive this car to Tennessee,” I say. “Jesus. Give me some credit. Gerry's expecting me to start singing in an hour.”

“ 'Cause that would be a foolish thing to try and do, Cory Beth,” Leary says.
“That road out there can't tell you a single thing that you don't already know.”

The engine
does indeed have a satisfying roar, and as I pull onto the dirt road, it feels like the whole world is vibrating. I aim my long, black hood toward the setting sun. Leary looked it up for me. It's 672 miles from Beaufort to Memphis, and Google estimated it would take a person ten hours and fourteen minutes to cross this particular distance. But if that person is driving a car with bad tires and an out-of-date inspection and trying to keep off the main roads, then I figure it will take twice that long. Thanks to the beer run, I have $199, a pack of protein bars, and a single Stella Artois, which Leary insisted I take, and within the hour Gerry will be expecting me at Bruiser's. But somebody else is going to have to sing his Jimmy Buffett and his Beach Boys tonight. They must have a squadron of their own illegitimate daughters out there somewhere. Girls with tiny feet and daddy dreams and pretty voices, all of us rattling up and down the waterfront, looking for work.

The sun is intense. I adjust the visor, which hardly helps, so there's nothing to do but let it shine, bouncing back at me from every mirror and burning away everywhere I grew up. My mama must have driven this same road thirty-seven years ago. She was heading east, with the sun behind her, while I'm heading west,
with it ahead of me, but she must have nonetheless passed this same old twisted cypress tree, this bend in the road where the waterway curves and you suddenly see it all at once stretched out below you, the whole bay waiting like a shimmering flat blue carpet, so beautiful that it hurts.

Honey was eighteen when she left Beaufort. Nineteen when she came back. Young. Crazy young. Young and pretty and pregnant and wiping off makeup layer by layer, excavating herself right back down to the girl she once was, the spell of Graceland wearing off just a little more with each mile that rolled by. It takes a long time to get from Memphis to Beaufort, especially if you're alone. But what she was thinking as she drove, nobody knows.

HONEY

August 19, 1977

I
'm a failure. I've failed completely and utterly at everything I set out to do.

But at least I have the Blackhawk. I have it by accident, but I still have it, and this car makes a statement. It says that Laura Berry might have snuck out of Beaufort on a Greyhound bus, but she's coming back riding 425 horses right down the middle of Bay Street, roaring to the sky like some kind of avenging angel. The townspeople stop in their tracks and stare at the sight of the Blackhawk rolling by, even though they can't see me through the tinted windows. They probably wouldn't recognize me if they did.

They don't have to know that I'm driving barefoot with no possessions in the world except for an eight-track tape, a tube of somebody else's lipstick, half a hamburger, and a jar of tupelo honey. They don't have to know I'm coming home in shame. Just let them see the car. That's enough. Just let them see the car and wonder.

I pass the ice cream stand where I had my first summer job. The sporting goods store where we were all fitted for our cheerleader uniforms, the library, and the fire station, and the beauty parlor where my mama gets her hair done, and the Chinese buffet. This town was the whole world to me at one time, not so very long ago. Before Graceland. Before Elvis. But now it feels small and flat, a little foreign, like nothing more than a town I once saw on a television show.

According to the clock on the courthouse tower, it's just past noon, which means Bradley will be eating his lunch. He's probably unpacking an egg salad sandwich he brought from home right now and sitting down at the picnic table behind the rusted yellow tin building that holds his family's business. It doesn't look like much, but Ainsworth Paving and Concrete is enough to make his family royalty in this small realm, or at least raise them high enough that when Bradley asked me to marry him, my mother said, “You'll never do any better.”

You'll never do any better
. Quite a thing to say to a girl not even a full day out of high school. And when I told Bradley no, thank you so very much, but no, Mama went to bed with a sick headache and didn't get up for a week.

I think being a preacher's wife must have been a mixed blessing for my mama. She liked the title, but she didn't like being poor. She found it humiliating when an Avon Lady from the congregation gave her samples, little tiny white plastic tubes that looked more like cigarette butts than lipsticks, or when a plumber brought somebody's cast-off toilet over to the manse and installed it, saying he knew for a fact that it was better than the one we had, since he'd donated that one too. And then we
had to all come into the bathroom and watch him flush and say a prayer of gratitude right then and there, gathered in a semi­circle and looking down into the swirling bowl. So I guess it's not surprising that Mama pushed me toward the kind of security she'd never had. She wanted nothing more than to get me into a house that was cool in the summer and warm in the winter and where all the appliances worked. Once a woman is married and stuck—and nobody's more stuck than a South Carolina preacher's wife—then all that's really left for her to do is to pray that her daughter makes a totally different kind of mistake.

“But I can't marry Bradley Ainsworth, Mama,” I said. It was the morning after graduation. She was adjusting the blinds, trying to shut out all the light, which I knew was a sign that one of her sick headaches was coming on. “He's a good person, but I just don't love him.”

She hesitated for such a long time that I knew she was thinking I had completely missed the point. Then she said, “Laura, honey, just tell me this. Have you really tried to love him?”

“I've tried real hard,” I said, which was more or less true. “I know Bradley's the answer to everything I need, but I can't make myself feel what I don't.”

She sighed. It was the sigh of a woman who'd spent a lifetime praying over secondhand toilets. “Well,” she said, dropping the last blind so that the room sank into total darkness. “There's always the chance that someday you'll change your mind. The human heart is a mysterious thing.”

I nodded and said, “Yes, ma'am,” but what she didn't know is that I already had a bus ticket in my pocketbook, along with
an ad ripped from the back pages of
Billboard
magazine. So let Mama talk all she wanted about compromise, and sensible choices, and what a bird in the hand was worth. I figured that in three days' time, I'd be in Graceland.

The bus
trip to Memphis was hell. Felt like it lasted forever. Like North Carolina alone was long and flat enough to kill a girl, like every worthless man in America was waiting for me in every station where I'd get out to stretch my legs, all of them asking me what my name was and where I was going. I arrived in Memphis sweaty and tired, smelling like cigarettes. So I spent half the money in my pocketbook at the YWCA just so I could take a shower, and then I put on my only clean dress and walked eighteen blocks to the audition. A man named Fred listened to a bunch of us sing, one after the other, in the back room of a diner, the sort of place where a Rotary or Kiwanis Club meets.

I sang the best I could, hit every note on my run, but Fred gave nothing away with his face. In fact, he kept the same sour expression the whole time, whether a girl was good or she was bad. But at the end of the day he picked five of us to, as he said, “await Elvis's final approval.” He called my name first. Then he said that Elvis was gone somewhere. I got the impression Elvis was almost always gone somewhere. But all that mattered was that Fred furthermore said they were going to move the five of us into Graceland until he got back.

We squealed and hollered. Put our arms around one another and jumped in a circle. This must have broken the hearts
of the girls who weren't chosen, I guess, like that little room in a Memphis diner was cheerleading and homecoming court all over again. But in the moment I couldn't stop to think about the others. I could only think that I was right on the cusp of getting everything I wanted. I may have started the day in a Greyhound bus station, but I was going to end it at Graceland.

It was early summer, that season of endless days, and for the whole next week we had the run of the place. We could swim and race the golf carts and try on the tour costumes with their fringe and beading, modeling them for one another, walking up and down the diving board of the pool like it was a Paris runway. The cook would fix us whatever we wanted, day or night, and what we wanted was mostly cakes and doughnuts. In some ways it was like the best sleepover a girl could imagine.

But in another way, Graceland was a trap.

We'd cheered when they'd driven us through the front gate. It had been glamorous, with musical notes woven between the gold-plated bars, and you almost expected to see Saint Peter himself standing guard. But when that gate clanged shut, I'd shuddered. I knew the sound from those times I'd done prison ministry with my daddy. He was always dragging me to some god-awful place to sing—trying to give hope to the hopeless as he said it—and so maybe I understood this particular sad vibration better than the other girls. Maybe I understood that Graceland was one of those places that was harder to get out of than into.

About a week in, when we were already bored out of our minds, everything changed. All of us girls were running through the mansion, drinking wine coolers out of coffee mugs and
shooting water at one another with empty shampoo bottles. At some point I slid down the banister and plopped butt-first on the black-and-white tile floor of the foyer. And then and there, I looked up to behold the King himself, wearing a white spangled jumpsuit and gazing down at my crotch.

The other girls had frozen in their tracks. The whole foyer had gone dead silent, except for Elvis. He was laughing.

“What's your name, honey?” he asked me.

I said “Laura Berry,” and he shook his head.

“Well, I'm going to call you Honey Bear,” he said, and that was that. He stepped over me, still chuckling, and went up the long curved staircase that led to the second level and the private hall. The part of Graceland that hardly anyone ever saw, certainly not silly girls like me. A heavy turquoise curtain waited at the top of the stairs. Elvis parted it, stepped behind the cloth, and was gone.

We never
sang for him at all, but the next morning the other girls were packing and crying and heading for home. I was the only one of that audition batch who'd be staying at Graceland, while for everybody else, their big adventure was over before it had begun. On her way out of the room, one of them turned, looked me right in the eye, and said, “Bitch.” It was the first and last time anyone's ever used that word in connection to me. She must have thought I planned the whole thing. Planned to go sprawling at Elvis's feet with my legs spread to Jesus and my white cotton panties showing, and even though I didn't, she's right in a way. Nothing that ever happened at
Graceland was sensible or fair, but for some reason, I was the one who was chosen. For some reason, I was the one he pulled into the fold.

But that
was the then and there, and this is the here and now. No use crying about it. No use wondering what might have been. I shake my head to erase the memory of Graceland and try to focus on being back in Beaufort. Pretty, sweet, unchangeable little Beaufort. The bridge that stretches over the waterway is the only thing I've seen since I hit town that seems at all different from the day I left. It looks like the water's gone gray instead of blue in my absence, but then I realize that's nothing but the tint of the window. I roll it down and, yeah, the bright, cool cut of the bay is still there. The wind hits my face and I catch a whiff of the salt and hear the gulls screaming out as they circle. And despite everything that's happened in the last four days, I smile. Being home isn't all bad.

After that, all that's left for me to do is to turn under the twisted branches of the old cypress, the prettiest tree on all of St. Mary's Island. The Blackhawk lurches and squeals in protest as it pulls onto the long, oyster-shell driveway that leads to Ainsworth Paving and Concrete. And as I roll up, I see Bradley sitting there, exactly like I'd imagined he'd be, at one of the picnic tables, all alone, sitting with his blue work shirt open down to his belt buckle. He's cut his hair. He looks good.

My heart softens, opens up a little in my chest. It's like right up until this moment I've been so preoccupied with how I'm going to fool Bradley that it never occurred to me that
maybe I wouldn't have to fool Bradley. I keep forgetting his kindness, the sweet open planes of his face. If there's anyone who can hear this awful story I'm fixing to tell and still love me, it's him. And yet my hand is limp on the door. This car has been my bubble. I see that now. It's protected me as I floated between one world and the next, but the minute I step out, that bubble will break. I pick up the little jar of tupelo honey from the passenger seat, leaking but still mostly full, and I put it into my pocket, thinking I will give it to him. A gift from the road. It's not much, but it's all I've got.

Bradley is tilting his chin and frowning as he stares at the car. Everyone does. You've got to study a car like this from a sideways angle, because it's like looking at the sun. Behold it directly and it shall smite thee blind. But even though Bradley can't possibly recognize the Blackhawk or see me through the windows, he seems to sense that something big is happening, because he stands up. Starts walking toward me, slowly at first, then picking up his pace, so that by the time I'm finally out of the car and he knows it's really me, Bradley is running. He catches me up and swings me around, and the movement is so abrupt that for a moment it knocks the air out of my chest. “I want to tell you . . .” I start, but then I can't speak, so I grab the collar of his work shirt. The cotton feels strong and warm beneath my hands, and he stops twirling me. Just holds me, dangling, in midair, our noses almost touching.

“I brought you something,” I say. “A souvenir. Because I have to tell you—”

“No,” he says. “You don't have to tell me anything because there's nothing to tell. You never went away and this whole year
never happened and you're my girl, always have been, always will be,” and then he begins spinning us again, harder than ever. My jacket flies open and the jar of tupelo honey slings out of the pocket, sailing through the air in one final high, free arc before hitting the hard red clay of home and shattering for good. I don't know if this is the end of my life or the beginning—or both. Because some moments are like that, they kill you and birth you in the same breath. I throw my head back and watch the trees circle above me and I exhale, maybe for the first time since I left Memphis. I'm safe in the arms of a boy who is going to give me a second chance. And a third and fourth one too probably, before it's all over. Because I'm safe in this world of infinite mercy, infinite forgiveness, infinite grace.

And when you think of it like that, the truth doesn't seem to matter all that much.