Last Ride to Graceland (7 page)

And then, with the next breath, I'm asleep.

When I
awaken, there's a man staring down at me from outside the car. He's tall, or maybe he just looks tall because he's standing and I'm lying flat. I struggle up, waking Lucy as I thrash, and roll down the window.

“Who are you?” he says. “And what the hell are you doing here?”

“Who are you?” I say back. “And what are you doing here?” For once in my life I'm not trying to sass anybody. They're two honest questions. I'm still half asleep.

“I own the land you're parked on,” he says, the sort of information that partly explains things, but not really. The clock on the dashboard isn't working, but I glance at it anyway. No telling what time it is, but the sun is fully up and I have the feeling I've slept a long time.

Since he gave me a half-assed answer, I figure he deserves the same. I dig out the Styrofoam cup and hand it to him out the window. “I was looking for the Juicy Lucy based on this cup.”

He rolls the cup over in his hand. Small hands for a man, I
think irrelevantly. “This cup is from the Rookery.”

“Oh shit. That's my milkshake cup from last night. Here . . .” I dig around. I'm going to have to get another bag. Start keeping my trash separate from Honey's. I hand him the Juicy Lucy cup and he falls silent, studying it deeply, like I've handed him something surprising, and of great value.

“This was my mother's old car,” I say. “She died recently, and I found it. Everything in it was something she touched and used when she was young and I feel like—” Here I break off, for there is no logical thing to say next. My mother may have died recently, if you call seven months ago recently, but the car is old, so why wouldn't I have known about it for years? And it is so obviously not an average person's car. Even if you know nothing about Elvis, even if you don't stop to Google the words
Stutz Blackhawk
, anybody can see this is an extraordinary vehicle with a story to match. So I stop babbling and just sit helplessly, staring up at the man's aviator shades, which reflect me back, doubled, to myself. They're cop sunglasses, even though I don't get the feeling he's a cop.

“I named my dog Lucy,” I finally say, even though I know that doesn't shed any light on anything.

He bends down and leans in the window. Takes it all in, from the map to the guitar and the waders and the dog and the empty Stella bottle.

“Looks like you're on the run from something,” he says.

“No,” I say. “I'm on the run to something. This is a . . . it's a voyage of discovery.”

To my great surprise, he laughs. “Who was your mother?”

“She was a backup singer for Elvis,” I say. “Traveled with
him the last year he toured, right before he died, and that's how I think she first came here. Her name was Laura Berry, but the people on the tour called her Honey.”

At this he reacts. Gets upset, or at least I think he's upset. It's hard to tell with those big, ridiculous aviator shades on, but he jerks his head back so fast that he hits it on the top of the window frame. “You're Honey's daughter?” He's the second man to ask me this in as many days and I'd never thought that being my mother's daughter was quite such a celebrity-making event, but evidently there was more to Laura Berry Ainsworth than her husband and child ever knew, because this man is gaping at me in sheer disbelief. He pulls off his glasses and he's older than I would have first guessed. Late fifties, maybe even early sixties, and something in him looks familiar.

“I've seen your face,” I say.

“Doubt it. Doubt it very seriously, as a matter of fact. You from around here?”

“Can I get out and stretch? Let the dog pee?”

“Suit yourself.”

I scramble out of the car, Lucy right behind me. He doesn't have his leash hooked to his collar and for a moment I panic, even though I'm still not sure I want a dog, much less this particular dog. But for some reason, Lucy decides he likes this man, standing up on his hind legs and doing a little dance of joy in front of him, and I snap the leash on.

“This dog's a boy,” the man says, and then he spits. “Why'd you name him Lucy?”

“He sort of named himself.”

The man studies me with solemn eyes, and in that precise
moment I know where I've seen him. On a billboard, looking down at me last night as I was driving into Macon. He's running for something. School board. State legislature. Governor. Sheriff maybe, and wouldn't that be a pretty pickle.

“The dog named himself.” The man snorts, but he scratches Lucy's ears nonetheless. “And you're here on a voyage of discovery. Yeah, I'd say you're Honey's daughter, all right.”

“How well did you know her?”

“Not that well. They'd always park the Lisa Marie right over there, in that hangar, whenever Elvis had a gig in town, and he liked our hamburgers . . .”

The word
our
is a slip, small but telling. He doesn't just own the land, he used to own the Juicy Lucy. Or at the very least worked there. I could call him on it, but something about this guy makes me feel like I'll get further with him by playing dumb.

“So they'd send some of the band members or singers over to pick up a bag of burgers,” I venture, even though it's hard to believe such a simple mission would have imprinted my mother on his memory for thirty-seven years. Of course she was traveling with Elvis, and that might have given her some special status, turning a simple burger run into the kind of story that would put the Juicy Lucy on the local map.

“You know what the secret to a good burger is?” the man asks me suddenly as we begin to make, by silent agreement, our slow way from the car to the restaurant. It looks less menacing in the light of day. The goddess is smiling down at us, and I'm just southern enough to find the curled vines of kudzu pretty. It's relentless the way it covers everything, turning cabins into
fairy cottages and abandoned railroad tracks into leafy green rivers. Kudzu's forgiving, like memory. It hides what was, allowing just small bits of the past to peek out here and there.

“Grease?” I guess, and the man laughs.

“Well, good for you,” he says. “Not many girls your age understand that.”

For the first time I notice a
FOR SALE
sign on the door. “You're getting rid of the place?”

“Trying to sell it. Sell it or bulldoze it, all the same to me. That's why I was out here, to see it there was anything worth taking when I go.”

When I tried the door the night before, I thought it was locked, but this man rattles the knob with confidence, and when it doesn't immediately obey, he puts his hip into it. The door gives way with a creak, and as it swings open I stoop to look inside. There's a lot to see. A counter, some stools, a pool table. A big, open area with what looks like the remnants of a beanbag chair and some sort of arcade game, cracked and broken in the corner. Indian bedspread curtains, a woven rug that has been half eaten by mice, and the same sort of pastel bubble graffiti that was on the outside is all over the walls. Flowers mostly, a frog on a lily pad, none of them particularly well drawn. The whole room is festooned in dust, the indoor equivalent of kudzu, with great ribbons of it hanging down from the rafters and windows.

“Why'd you close down?” I ask the man, pulling Lucy back before he gallops in and does something crazy like pee on what's left of the pool table.

“Times change,” the man says with a shrug. He's made a
gesture for me to step in and I do, but he doesn't enter himself. He just stands there in the doorway, blinking, sunlight streaming past him on both sides and making the dust sparkle.

“Did the cops do it? You got raided?”

It's the most obvious two questions in the world, but he bristles, takes offense. “What'd you say your name was?”

“I didn't. Cory Beth Ainsworth.”

“Cory?”

“That's right.”

“And where'd you come from?”

“Beaufort.”

“And you say Honey's dead.”

“A few months ago. Breast cancer.”

“I'm sorry to hear that. And how old would you be?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Thirty-seven?”

“Yes, sir. I was born in 1978. Seven months and four days after my parents got married. Seven months and nine days after my mama left Memphis. So I think you see my situation. I would think it's rather obvious why I'm driving this route, and just what truth I'm trying to get at. May I ask you some questions? Starting with your name?”

He's staring at me. At least I think he's staring, because he's put his aviator sunglasses back on. But his feet are planted wide apart and he's got a hand on each side of the doorframe. Looking back at him with the sun streaming in on both sides, I'm reminded of those old cowboy movies where the bad guy comes bursting into the saloon and it hits me that maybe I've been stupid, getting out of my car and coming in here with a stranger. I
could scream at the top of my lungs and there'd be no one to hear me, not here at the end of a rarely traveled road with nothing but the sound of airplane engines in the distance. Normally a dog might be some help, but Lucy's just curled up on the grimy concrete floor, licking himself.

“Name's Philip,” the man says. “You can ask me your questions and I'll answer them as best I can, even though all I know about your mama is that she'd come in with the other girls who sang backup and he'd be with them too. I don't know what Honey told you growing up, but Elvis was never too good to mix with the common man. He wasn't the sort who'd sit on his plane and send somebody to get him a sack of burgers. No, he'd get off and come in himself, and whether you believe it or not, little girl, he sat right on that corner bar stool the last time he was in and he played up a storm. The blues and rockabilly, the kind of music that gave him his start, and he remembered every line of every song. Even though by that point he'd been singing his Vegas crap for better than ten years.”

“I believe you,” I say. “He was playing the old stuff at the end. Like he was circling back. Like he knew he didn't have long.”

The man shrugs. “Whatever you say. Your mother was just one of the girls who came in with him. I don't know what there is to tell you beyond that.”

“But she came through town again,” I said. “A year later. In the Blackhawk, the car I'm driving now. You'd have to remember that, wouldn't you? It would have been probably no more than two, maybe three days after Elvis died, and this time she was alone. Maybe scared. I'm thinking probably scared. It seems
like all that would have made an impression.”

He pulls off the glasses again. It seems to be his nervous gesture, this putting on and pulling off of his glasses. Everybody has one. His small eyes are red rimmed and I wonder if he's one of those people who has to wear sunglasses all the time because he's light sensitive. “And I'm sure it would have made an impression if I'd have seen her,” he said. “But I didn't.”

“You're sure?”

“I said I didn't see her and I didn't.”

“But here's the thing . . . There's that cup and a bag out there in the car, both saying the name of this restaurant, plain as day. The Juicy Lucy in big pink letters, and that's how I knew to come here. I'm not suggesting anything, sir, because I've seen your face on a billboard and I'm sure you're a respectable man here in Macon, a pillar of the community. I'm just trying to get at the truth. Or at least my own little piece of it.”

He leans back abruptly, pulling his hands away from the doorway. “Now look here,” he says. “I could have run you in for trespassing and I didn't. You wanted inside the restaurant and I brought you in. And I've stood here and held my temper while you implied I'm a liar, not once but twice. Your mother had a sweet nature and I'm sorry to hear she's passed, but all that aside, I hardly knew her. So I'd say our interview is coming to an end.”

“I'd love it if we could sit somewhere and talk. Maybe I can buy you a Starbucks.”

“I don't drink Starbucks. The coffee's too fucking strong and it's a sign of everything that's wrong in America today.”

Exactly like something Mama would have said. I try again. “I still have questions.”

“Don't we all.”

I look around the room, trying to imagine it years ago. The colors bright and unfaded, the music loud. The smell of grease and pot mingling in the air and Elvis on a bar stool holding court. The absence of chairs. His listeners must have clustered around him on the floor, sitting at his feet like the apostles with Jesus, and maybe it felt good after the big stages and venues to sneak away to a little nothing place like this and take the glitter off. I have a million questions to ask this man, but I hear myself blurt out, “Did my mother smoke weed?”

He laughs again. But it's a genuine laugh, not a bitter one, and Lucy looks up from his balls.

“You want the truth?”

“You know I do.”

He spits on the floor. Put his sunglasses back on. “Then I'll give you what you say you've come for,” he says. “Your mother was a wild child. She did it all and she did it all the time.”

With that, the air seems to go out of the room. I stumble, even though I'm not moving, and throw out an arm to brace myself against the dusty wall. I'm filled with a sudden desire to get out of the Juicy Lucy, off of Freight Road, and far away from this town. I head toward the door and Philip steps aside to let me pass, as if he's aware that despite my big claims, he's said too little and too much, all in the same sentence. Lucy trots along behind me and we're almost back to the car when he calls out.

“Wait a minute,” he says. “Don't I get a chance to ask my own question?”

I get the dog into the car and climb in myself. Fasten the seat belt, crank up that engine, which would suit a crop duster
better than a car, and then he walks over and stoops down. He has to practically crawl through the window in order to be heard over the roar, so it looks like we'll be ending our relationship in exactly the same position we began it. As I put my hands on the steering wheel, I notice I still have the phone numbers from yesterday inked on my arms, the one for Graceland and the one for Leary. They're blurry but still legible. Meaning, I guess, that maybe I could still either go forward or back.