Last Ride to Graceland (5 page)

PART TWO

Macon, Georgia

CORY

May 30, 2015

A
t first I thought this car was a time capsule, but now I'm thinking it's more of a treasure chest and that this bag of trash Leary threw together is the closest thing I have to a map. I'm like a pirate in reverse, somebody who's found the gold and who's now looking for the person who must have lost it. It's a funny thing to find yourself telling a story backward, to have the end but not the beginning, to know the what of a situation, but not the how or why.

I stop at a rest area about an hour outside of Beaufort and lay it all out across the passenger seat, trying to figure the route the Blackhawk must have taken thirty-seven years ago. The closest clue that I find, at least in terms of raw geography, is the Styrofoam cup with the lipstick smear. The side says
JUICY LUCY
in big, fat, graffiti-looking print, and below that are the much smaller words
MACON, GEORGIA
. And there's a crumpled white bag, gone dark with time and grease that evidently came from the same establishment.

What the trash suggests so far is that Mama took a serpentine route from Memphis to Beaufort, not cutting east to west along the more-or-less straight lines of the interstates, but rather scooping and weaving her way across the South, stopping in places as far-flung and illogical as Fairhope, Alabama. There's a napkin from a barbecue joint there, the logo featuring one of those fat, grinning cartoon pigs that seems happy as hell to have ended life as somebody's sandwich.

I don't need the crumpled map to tell me that Fairhope's as far south as you can get without falling into the Gulf of Mexico. I remember one time Mama was singing that Cher song “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves” in the kitchen, and when she got to the part about “Picked up a boy just south of Mobile,” I said that didn't make any sense, because Mobile's right on the bay, with nothing lying past it but water. They must have pulled up that boy with a fishing line. But Mama was quite insistent. She got out the atlas and showed me there was a narrow lip of land stretching around the bay, like a backward C, with Mobile perched at the top and some little place called Fairhope down at the bottom. She paused as we looked at the map, her fingertip grazing the ragged outline of the coast, then she flicked at the page, the way you flick away an ant.

“So the boy who knocked Cher up must have come from Fairhope,” I said, partly because I could be a bit of a pissant when I was a kid and partly because Mama was always teaching me old song lyrics without bothering to explain what any of them meant. Mama liked Cher. She sang her all the time in the kitchen, especially the music from after she left Sonny.

I study the map. Beaufort to Macon is pretty much a
straight shot west. I can make it there before dark. Once I leave Macon, it'll take that long, slow dip through the fattest parts of Georgia and Alabama to get me to Fairhope. From there the trail runs pretty much due north, going west just enough to scoop by Tupelo, Mississippi, where a receipt from the trash bag tells me Mama bought something from a roadside stand. Something marked just “8 oz. jar” scrawled in red ink, something that cost her $2.15. Then a little more west and a little more north and I'm in Memphis. Back to the place where she began.

That road out there can't tell you a single thing that
you don't already know
. That's what Leary said to me on the banks of Polawana, and he undoubtedly spoke the truth. But right now I don't know anything, so it seems like this road stretched in front of me, long and flat and ugly as a runway, is gonna have to tell me something. I'm already in trouble with the money. Leary poured in a little gas from a can he had in his truck, just enough to get me going, and I stopped for more as soon as I was far enough out of Beaufort that I didn't figure anybody would know me. It cost $24.50 to fill the Blackhawk tank, which was bad enough, but then the needle started dropping almost the second I was back on the road and if I'm figuring it right I'm only getting about ten miles a gallon. Maybe not even that much. Which means it'll cost me twenty-five dollars to drive a hundred miles, and if I'm going as far south as Fairhope and then back up . . . The math is so depressing I have to stop.

Why the hell did Mama take such an indirect route? Was she trying to hold to the back roads too? Was she afraid, even in 1977, that a car like this made her too obvious? But that only makes a certain kind of sense, since I'd imagine that cops
in small towns are even more curious about unusual people passing through in unusual vehicles than troopers cruising the interstate. Would she have been so frightened that she would have deliberately chosen to go miles out of her way just to avoid detection, even when it was clear she was trying to hurry? I conclude she was trying to hurry because of all the trash in the car—she may have stopped to order, but apparently she ­always took the food with her, eating as she drove, and the ­passenger's-side seat was reclined when I found it, lying damn near horizontal, suggesting she spent at least one night sleeping in the car.

But when I consider the evidence in another light, it isn't quite so surprising that all the napkins and wrappers in the trash bag Leary handed me are from local places, like this Juicy Lucy cup and bag from Macon. Mama hated fast-food chains. Hated Walmarts and Holiday Inns and big supermarkets too, anything that she thought stripped the individual flavor out of a place. She considered what she called “the homogenization of America” the great evil of our time. All right, then. She must have picked something up at a place called Juicy Lucy—likely a hamburger, if the perfectly round grease stain on the bag can be trusted—and that was evidently the last stop on her sojourn before coming home. I look deeper into the bag for a receipt, but there is none. Nor do I find any signs of gas receipts, so I guess she either didn't have a credit card or didn't choose to pay with one, which raises another interesting question. What had she used for money, in her flight from there to here?

It's a muddle. I sigh and lean back in the seat to ponder the limited charms of an I-95 rest area. The sun has almost fully
disappeared and I watch a dog, long-legged and clumsy, like a puppy just west of the cute stage, sniffing around a trash can. Somebody's put him out. Turned tail and left him here, maybe a day ago or maybe a week, and he doesn't understand they're not coming back. My chest grows tighter as I watch him rise on his back legs, bringing his nose up to the top of the trash can. He's not quite tall enough to reach it, even with a stretch, but whatever's underneath that lid smells promising enough that he begins to wag his stubby tail, and there's something in that gesture, that undying little nub of hope that still exists in the most hopeless of situations, that makes me feel suddenly weepy and weak. He's not a pretty dog. It's hard to tell what type he is. Too small to be a hunting dog, too big to be lap dog, and so awkward with those skinny legs and big feet that nobody's ever going to want him.

I could toss him one of the protein bars. Call animal control, maybe, for whatever county I'm in, only he's not the kind to get adopted; he's too big and nondescript. But I sure as hell can't leave him here, not with all those cars going ninety miles per hour at the top of the ramp, because dogs make me feel guilty in a way people never do. I think it's how they ask for nothing and seem so damn grateful when they get it.

There's an eight-track sticking out of the tape player and I eject it. It's not a normal one, with a sticker showing the artist and the album cover, but a plain white shell of an eight-track, with only the word
DEMO
written across it, slanted, in black Magic Marker. I push it back in, still watching the dog, and for a second I think it's broken. There's a gentle roar, the sort of empty sound you get when you bring your ear to a conch shell,
and then not music at all, but a woman's voice.

“Want me to set it here?” she says. “Is this close enough to pick up?”

The answer is indistinct, the low rumble of a man talking, but then a guitar begins. Acoustic, like mine, which is flung in the backseat along with the protein bars and three changes of underwear. Whoever's playing the guitar is pretty good. But they stop after a minute or two and I can hear the voices in the background again.

“Come on,” says a woman. Different voice from the first one. Higher, breathier. “Just ease your way into it. You know you can.”

It's my mother's long-ago voice. I always wondered how someone who spoke that soft could sing that loud.

And then the guitar comes in again, the same lead, played with a little more vigor this time. The lyrics start up too, a line about looking into the water, standing at the end of the pier, and it's clear with the very first word that I'm listening to Elvis.

He sings a couple of bars, then stops. Both women's voices are back at once, cajoling and comforting, like a pair of mothers trying to force medicine down the throat of a sickly child. The man on the tape may be king, but he's an uncertain king. He's singing a song I've never heard—somehow I think he's singing a song nobody has ever heard. Judging by the static and the background noises, I don't think this tape was made in a recording studio. I think I'm listening to something raw and personal. Elvis and Mama and this other woman—her voice lower and silkier than Mama's, and I get the impression maybe she's black, maybe the same black woman in the picture—were
working on a song in private. A song about a pier and water, a man standing at the end of it and looking down. A man who's come to the end of his earthly powers and who now must, for maybe the first time in a long time, rely on something beyond his own strength.

The dog has given up on the trash can and is wandering along the sidewalk, barely out of range of the cars pulling in and pulling out. People not paying attention to some stray Georgia dog, people who just want to text or pee or text while they're peeing. Elvis mumbles something that sounds like, “Too much Otis,” but even so he's still strumming, for I think the singer and the guitarist are the same person. It has the feel of that, of a man fitting the notes around the lyrics, making it up as he goes. “Too much Otis,” must mean “Too much like Otis Redding,” and the lyrics truly are a little reminiscent of “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” but the tone is different. When Otis Redding sang that song you knew he had given up, and this new lyric . . . .

Waiting on the water, waiting on the water. Waiting on the water to carry me home.

Elvis is singing again, and I know enough of his history to know this melody is like his old stuff, the stripped-down music from the early years, even before he started recording at Sun Records. The sort of song he knew when he was just a boy, singing in church and playing the county fairs. I recognize the gospel tremor in his voice because I have it too, and so did my mama. It's the voice of anybody who started out in the church or maybe even just in the South, the voice of someone who can't even say the goddam word
home
without lifting the note just a little bit right at the very end, as hopeful as a dog at a rest stop, sure as shooting that waiting out there somewhere, some
how, is an angel just for them.

I roll down my window. I roll down Elvis's window, I guess is a better way to say it, and I holler at the dog. “Get out of the road,” I tell him, and Elvis has stopped singing. He's still doubting himself. He slaps his hand against the strings of the guitar and he's mumbling again, something about a rip-off and I know how that feels, as if everything you write just sounds like a half-ass imitation of everything that's been written before. You're spent and you're tired and you know you've grown out of the cute stage and the world expects something new from you now, only you've got nothing to give them. Your hands come up full of air.

It's not a rip-off,
I think, trying to will Elvis to pick up that guitar, to start playing again.
Otis Redding knew damn well nothing was going to come his way. But your song is different. You still have hope. And you can't get rid of it, country boy, no matter how hard you try.

“Come on, baby, just sing,” says my mother, like she always said to me. “Don't worry about Otis. He's waiting for death and you're waiting for Jesus.”

That thought is so much like my own that I look toward the eight-track, half expecting to see my mother sitting there on the dash somehow, come back to me intact through time and space. But instead the car is filled with a louder roar, a horrible chewing sound, and when I try to eject the tape, I see it's come unspooled, and all the silky brown strands of music have gotten tangled and trapped. I hold the eight-track half in and half out with one hand and ease my other hand around the sides, trying to reach into the slot and unhook the tape, but it's hopeless. It's all coming loose in my hands. Elvis's last song—hell, maybe his only real song, since I don't recall any others he might have written, and I guess that's why my mother was trying to encour
age him all those years ago. Because her “baby” was said in the same coaxing voice she used with me when I was sure I was going to fail algebra or was too scared to do the Christmas solo. Elvis was forty-two when he died, and Mama was nineteen, the true baby in the room, so why would she be talking to him with that kind of authority when he was old enough to be her father?

But the answer is gone now, falling to shreds no matter what I do to stop it, along with the voices of Elvis and my mother and the woman who was wondering if she should set something—the tape recorder probably—closer to the microphone. No, they weren't in a studio. It didn't sound like there was anyone else in the room. No producer or musicians, and I have the sense this song was something Elvis was afraid of, or embarrassed by, some part of himself he never planned to show the world. I gently set the busted eight-track, with pieces of greenish-brown tape stringing out like seaweed, onto the passenger seat.