Last Ride to Graceland (6 page)

I crank the car. It roars up so proud and mighty that I figure the sound must be costing me at least a dollar and a half. I back out of my parking place and start up the ramp. The dog's still there. I dig around for a protein bar to toss him but then I think he probably needs water more and I've got a bottle in here from the service station and surely I can find some sort of cup to pour it into. The ashtray pops out into my hand the minute I tug, and it's ironic, sure, ironic as hell to be giving a stray dog water out of a solid gold ashtray, but the day abounds with irony already, so why not?

Nobody's behind me and I ease the car over. Say something to the dog out the window and his ears go right up. He trots
over to me without question as I open the door and lean out to give him the water and then, boom, he's up and over my lap in a second, knocking aside Bradley's waders and wedging himself down into the passenger seat with his tail wagging like crazy and his tongue hanging out.

“Oh no, you don't,” I say, but it's hard to get a grip on him when he doesn't have a collar, so I give him the water and the protein bar, which fill him with so much unspeakable delight that he tries to kiss me, his long nails pushing into my thigh, and by then the fight had gone out of me. No point in trying to open the door and push him out the other side. He's taken up residence. He's sitting there staring straight ahead as if to say, “Let's get on with it.”

What now? Events seem to be beyond my control and they have been ever since I looked in Bradley's fishing shed window and beheld this Stutz Blackhawk waiting for me, waiting in its bubble wrap cocoon. This car's driving me, and there's no point in pretending otherwise, although it is damn distressing to contemplate that I've been on the road for less than an hour and I've already managed to spend $24.50, destroy the final recorded words of Elvis Presley, and adopt a dog.

The cup
Honey drank from thirty-seven years ago says Juicy Lucy but offers no address, and without a phone I can't do a search. When I swing off at a Walmart to buy the dog a collar, leash, chew toy, bag of kibble, and water dish ($21.72), the cashier claims she's never heard of the place. So I drive downtown and park in front of some dying strip center. It's mostly dark
now, so maybe the Blackhawk won't attract too much attention here, and besides, attempting to parallel park this monstrosity on a city street is entirely out of the question. It's not really the kind of car you park. You have to dock it. I get the dog out. He's clearly never been walked on a leash and the skill doesn't exactly come to him quick. He strains diagonally to the right and then to the left, but we finally make it up the hill and into what appears to be the restaurant district of Macon.

At first I walk back and forth fairly aimlessly, with the dog lunging and jumping and peeing on every corner. There's no Juicy Lucy in sight, of course there isn't, and it's beginning to strike me that I've been very stupid, tearing off half-assed like this, with no plan and no money and no phone to look up things, like addresses and directions. This crazy interstate dog is getting ready to bite somebody and he probably hasn't even had his shots. I pass a cool little place with outside dining and a singer is setting up in the corner and I picture Gerry in my mind, no doubt pissed as hell that I didn't show up and didn't call, and I begin to wonder if I could go back to Beaufort now, even if I wanted to. Because I've been toying with the idea the last hour, even though I know Bradley's going to be, not pissed, but, in his words, “extremely disappointed” that I looked in the shed when he told me not to. Gerry might fire me for blowing off a Friday night and so there's a very real chance I could be returning to even less of a life than the one I left. But Leary would probably take the dog, which would be great, because this is absolutely the sort of dog that was born to ride in a tow truck, and this wouldn't be the first time I've disappointed Bradley and Gerry and they always seem to get over it. And at the rate the Black
hawk is guzzling gas, I've probably got just enough money to . . .

Just as I'm thinking all this, and half envying this guy who's setting up for a gig he probably hates, my eye falls on a chalkboard sign advertising Elvis Presley milkshakes. It's got to be some sort of sign. A sign that's on a sign. That's the best kind. Apparently, the milkshakes are made from banana ice cream and peanut butter with a straw made out of candied bacon. I haven't eaten since breakfast, unless you count the beer, and the thought of an Elvis Presley milkshake sounds so good my stomach rumbles.

Seven dollars.

What the hell. I'm starving and there's no point in going either backward or forward tonight and besides, several people at the sidewalk tables have dogs with them. Of course, they have little well-groomed, well-trained city dogs, not some wild-eyed stray coonhound kind of creature who is straining so hard he's about to break his cheap Walmart leash.

“You're going to have to be good,” I say to the dog, who has no response, and I sit down at the table nearest the singer. He glances over at me.

“How long have you worked here?” I ask him.

He has to stop and think, poor bastard. “Six years.”

“You ever hear of a place called the Juicy Lucy? I think it's probably some kind of diner. And it's been around a real long time. Maybe forty years.”

He shakes his head. “I'm not a local. Dave here is a local.”

Dave, who must be my server, is approaching with water and menu in hand. I wave him back before he can get close enough for the dog to bite him and we go through the whole
Juicy Lucy's bit again even though it's beginning to dawn on me that what I need to find is not just a local, but an old local, or at least someone older than me and these guys. Someone who'd remember the seventies.

Dave's never heard of the Juicy Lucy either, but he says one of the cooks has been around forever and he might know. Then he asks, all sticky sweet like a good server, “But why are you looking for some greasy diner? We have the best food in town.”

The trouble is, I don't know exactly why I'm looking for the place, aside from the fact my mother once ate food from there. I don't know what I'm looking for at all, or what questions I'll ask when I find it. It seems that I must not merely return the car to Graceland, but retrace the steps of Mama's whole trip, that the explanation for why she ran away is somehow buried beneath the question of how she ran and I'm going to have to dig through the trash of one to get to the truth of the other. The server and the musician are still looking at me, so I stall.

“Is that Elvis Presley milkshake really worth seven dollars?” I ask.

The musician answers. “It'd be worth $107,” he says. “It's scary good.”

“Then bring me one,” I say, and as the dog jumps up against the table in a doomed attempt to eat the salt shaker, inspiration strikes. “My mother used to work at the Juicy Lucy back in the day,” I say. “And she talked about the place all the time. I even named my dog Lucy, so I just thought it'd be funny to take a picture of the dog standing in front of the restaurant.”

The server and the musician seem to more or less accept this explanation, even though all this leaping has provided evi
dence beyond dispute that the dog in question is male. But I guess no matter how much stuff he's got flopping around in the breeze, he's Lucy for life now, and someday this will be a funny story, if I ever find the right person to tell it to. The singer goes back to setting up his equipment. The server goes to get the milkshake and the cook.

I'm due for some luck and now, all of a sudden out of nowhere, I get a triple dose. The musician starts and he's good, with enough sense to open with a little Bonnie Raitt, who hardly anybody remembers and practically everybody likes. The music soothes me and, more important, it soothes the Lucy dog, who curls up under the table and goes to sleep as if to confirm that it's been a hell of a day and he for one would be happy to see the end of it. The milkshake shows up, complete with its bacon straw, and it's the best damn thing I've ever put in my mouth. I don't know if I'd pay $107 for it, but I'll gladly pay $7 and I'm starting to relax a little bit, lulled into a sort of bluesy sugar trance, when the cook emerges and says that sure, yeah, of course he remembers the Juicy Lucy.

“I don't know what your mama told you,” he says, folding his arms across his big stomach, “and I hope I'm not speaking out of turn. But the Juicy wasn't some family diner, it was a pothead place. Like a bar where people got high instead of drunk and the cops closed it down for good more than thirty years ago.”

Well, that's something to digest. Lucy's woken up and I throw him half the bacon, which gets his tail wagging so hard that the whole table starts pulsating. “But it had food?” I ask, remembering the bag with that great circle of grease.

“Well, sure it had food. Stoners gotta eat.” He laughs, but doesn't unfold his arms. “Burgers and shit, but the food was just the cover. It was out by the airport. Not the airport airport, but one of those back roads that take you down to the shorter runways where the private planes land.” He looks at the server. “What's the name of that road? The one where they found that poor little girl's body last year?”

“What poor little girl?” I ask. The musician is leafing through his music.

“Some dead teenager,” says the cook. “All I'm saying is that there's not a big call for urban development out that way. But that might work in your favor, since the odds are high the building's still standing just like it was. It had this big pink and purple mermaid lady sprayed on the side like graffiti. You know, like that Beatles cartoon.”

“
Yellow Submarine
?”

“That's the one. Damned hippie place.” He moved toward the table, clicking an ink pen. “Here. Give me that napkin. I can't remember the road name but I'll draw you a map.”

Perhaps at
one time the phrase “private airport” conjured up images of status and exclusivity, but now the road that runs behind the main airport—which, as it ends up, has the completely unimaginative name Freight Road—holds nothing more than long-term parking lots, mechanics, a FedEx drop-off, and a couple of down-on-their-luck strip clubs, which claim to have
BEER
and
GIRLS
, but without showing any particular enthusiasm for either. I drive all the way to the very end and shine the Black
hawk's lights into an overgrown field and there it is, just where the cook promised. A concrete building so engulfed in kudzu that you can barely make out the name. But the
JUI
is clear enough, as are pieces of the lady herself, one shoulder and both feet, so the cook did have that part wrong. She's not a mermaid, she's some sort of goddess.

Either way, it's hard to imagine my mother—or even the dark-eyed, smirking Honey of that old photograph—ever hanging out at a place like this. I can only assume that she originally entered the pink-painted door of the Juicy Lucy halfway through her tour with Elvis, when the
Lisa Marie
landed on one of these short runways and taxied into one of these small han­gars. I get Lucy out and let him pee. The headlights of the Blackhawk pump an arc of yellow-green light into the dark Georgia night, enough so that the whole front of the restaurant is eerily illuminated. I venture up and try the door. It's locked, but the windows, low and already half broken, would be easy enough to push out in case I decide to enter in the morning. Thanks to the combined costs of the gas and the milkshake and the dog, I'm going to have to spend the night in the car—that's a given. Mama obviously slept in this car once, and maybe she even slept right here, in front of the Juicy Lucy, in this same passenger seat that's still half cranked down. I consider driving farther up the road and parking under one of the streetlights near the strip clubs, which may or may not be safer, and which definitely ups the chance some cop will notice the car. There's no explanation for why I'm driving a vehicle that is more than three decades overdue for inspection and has no registration card in the glove compartment. I know because I checked. Just
seeing the car in the name Elvis Presley would have answered a lot of questions—and raised as many more, I guess—but having a fancy old car with no registration at all would surely cause the cops to haul me in. And, awful as Freight Road is, I bet it's a lot better than the Macon jail.

The other option is to stay right here, parked in front of the Juicy Lucy. A place where I'm less likely to be found by a cop and more likely to be found by some sort of slasher-movie boogeyman. I don't want to be murdered any more than I want to be arrested.

“Are you going to protect me?” I say to Lucy, who is crunching kibble right out of the bag. I've got to break him of this snacking—that sack of dog food has got to last us to Memphis and back, but for now all I can seem to do is crank down the seat a few degrees and finish the last of the Stellas, warm as it is. A milkshake and a protein bar and two beers hardly constitute a proper day's sustenance, and I know I'll wake up hungry and have to spend more money on breakfast. I look over at Bradley's waders, which are still strapped in the passenger seat, even though they've been knocked all askew by the dog. I unstrap them and put the soles against the passenger side glass, facing down, in hopes that any murderer who comes knocking might logically deduce that there's a big man doing his private business in this car. A man so big that nobody in their right mind would want to mess with him.

And then we settle down, me in the driver's seat and the dog in the back and Bradley's boots up against the glass. The seats go almost totally flat and are deep and cushioned. This is a car that was meant to sleep in, I think. Or have sex in, or escape
in. And despite everything, despite all the events of this bewildering day, I feel myself drifting off almost at once. My last thought before I go under is that I think I can smell honey on the seats. Not the person, but the actual stuff, rich and sweet, the kind of honest honey that comes straight from the bees, with ragged walls of comb half floating in the jar. The kind of honey you dribble over warm biscuits on Sunday morning, before your grandmother takes you to church.