Last Ride to Graceland (9 page)

“Yeah,” I say. “Isn't it?” I've decided at some point my best defense is to acknowledge that the car is amazing, because to act nonchalant just gives rise to a whole new type of question. I take the two sausage biscuits, my coffee, and all the little planet-­choking packets of sugar and cream and pull into a parking place. Lucy is going nuts with the smell of the sausage. I feed it to him in little pieces and study the building in front of me. Can paternity be determined from the saliva on an old straw? The blood on a napkin? I imagine Elvis pressing the napkin to his mouth, driving through the Graceland gate on that August night thirty-seven years ago, unaware he'd never drive out of them again. Unaware he may have fathered me as well, unaware Honey would take his car and flee all the way from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, looking for something she evidently was not destined to find, before finally abandoning the car and everything it represented in a shed in South Carolina. Where it would have stayed forever if Bradley hadn't needed his waders and I hadn't been the kind of girl who has absolutely nothing to lose.

I could drive to Atlanta and get some big-city answers. Take
my bag of questions to the CDC and let them sort it all out. I glance down at the sack of trash in the floor of the passenger seat, even though I know anything within it likely only holds the DNA of Laura Berry Ainsworth, the one person whose identity was never in question. Lover to some, perhaps even to many. Mother to one. A funnel that the whole world rushed through in the summer of 1977, and as quickly as the idea rises, it dies. It's Saturday, early in the morning. There's a drop-off slot, I can see it from here. The Kleenex with the blood is the most important piece of evidence, along with the blood that courses through my own veins, but there's no way to put either of them through a shiny silver slot in a door of a bush-league medical clinic in Macon, Georgia. There's a law office right beside the DNA clinic, a liquor store on the corner. I guess you can make a day of it if you want to. Find out who your baby daddy is, sue him for child support, and get rip-roaring drunk.

But not at eight twenty on a Saturday morning.

“You ready to hit the road, boy?” I say, and Lucy whinnies as if to say
Yeah, the sooner we blow this Popsicle stand, the better.

But leaving Macon is harder than I thought it would be. I get so lost I circle the city for nearly an hour, mostly because I'm still trying to avoid the interstate. At first I tell myself the whole thing is sort of a charming adventure. It's the back roads that give you the feel of a place, that's what Mama always said, but after my third wrong turn with no phone to help me, I'm happy as an Alabama pig to see a sign pointing to I-75. I get on it and drive slow, or at least as slow as a car like the Blackhawk can go. Lucy's curled up with Bradley's waders in the back, snoring and farting, and the envelope with the money is beside
me on the seat. At one point I think I pass one of the billboards with my benefactor's picture, but his dark, sorrowful eyes are behind me in a flash and I'm half happy I don't know this man's name or what sort of office he feels entitled to hold. Better to think of him as just one more guardian angel of the road come to give me bad news and good money. And so I keep on driving until Macon, Georgia, is just a shimmer in my rearview mirror.

HONEY

August 19, 1977

Y
ou've got to help me.”

“And why is that? Why've I got to help you? We both know it's not mine.”

The worst words a man can say to a woman, but I try not to let the fear show on my face. “What makes you so sure?”

“Because I had the mumps when I was thirteen. Has anyone ever told you what the mumps do to a thirteen-year-old boy?”

He looks toward the open door and frowns, like he's remembering something. Something unpleasant. I try to remain calm, but inside I'm shivering. This baby has to be Philip's. The timing is right and I can prove it, because I never outgrew my girlhood habit of keeping a diary. I still mark the start of my periods with a little star. I wish I had a diary like my old one with the pink hearts and the lock instead of what I write in now, which is just a plain blue spiral notebook from the grocery store. My old diary was small. It forced a girl to reduce her life
to a series of tiny boxes, giving her just five lines to summarize who had hurt her and who had helped her, all the good and bad that can happen in a single day. It's a fine thing, I think, to be forced to
edit reality. It turns your life into a haiku.

Back to the Lucy.

Told him there's a baby.

Mumps steal my best
chance.

I'd like to add a word, to put a
but
in the last line, so that it reads “but mumps steal my best chance.” Unfortunately, that one
but
would destroy the unforgiving pattern of the poem. A haiku is a five-syllable line, followed by a seven-syllable line, then five more. I learned how to write them from one of the karate teachers at Graceland, a would-be country singer who'd left Pasadena with the name David but who had a vision somewhere along the road and arrived in Memphis calling himself Nin Tuch. I guess he thought it sounded more spiritual. Elvis renamed him at once. He'd call him “Nunchucks,” and everyone would laugh, because that was the first rule of Graceland. Elvis makes a joke, no matter how corny, and everyone rolls around on the floor in hysterics.

“You had the mumps?” I repeat to Philip. I say it like I don't understand what that means, but of course I do. He's telling me that he's sterile, and that's why he laughed me off two months ago, as we lay tangled up in each other on this same dusty floor, when I finally got up my courage enough to suggest he use a rubber. Of course he had laughed. He's been carrying a Get Out of Jail Free card ever since he was thirteen.

But he must be telling the truth, because he's the very picture of nonchalance, smiling at me as he leans back against the refrigerator. It's broken, just like everything in this bar. There's a puddle of water at his feet and his arms are folded across his chest. He's not ever going to open those arms to me, much less to this baby. He's already written me off as a slut who's been with a dozen men, when the truth is there have only been two, and if this little heartbeat fluttering below my ribs wasn't set into motion by him, then it must have been the work of the other. I'm not sure how I feel about this information—in fact, I'm not sure how I feel about anything at all because my mind is busy galloping ahead. Philip had the mumps and therefore he can't be the father, and as awful as he is—I can see his awfulness now, standing right in front of me—he was still the better of the two options.

I start to say, “You took my virginity,” but what would be the point? He wouldn't believe me, and even if he did, that simple statement—which would make the perfect middle line of a haiku, come to think of it, seven syllables—doesn't begin to tell the whole story. I wanted to be rid of my innocence. He didn't take it from me, I threw it at him, and if he hadn't been the one who happened to lie beside me on that magic carpet night, with the music so seductive and the air thick as a blanket, sooner or later I would have found someone else. I was tired of being the only virgin flying on the
Lisa Marie
and I stupidly imagined that sex would open some kind of door. That it would take me into a different room, to a different part of myself.

We were all still revved after the Saturday show when we came into the Lucy that night, just looking to chill for a few
hours before it was time to fly to Jacksonville. Something in the air had felt special. Different. Someone had strung up Christmas lights, placed them all around the ceiling so that red and green pulsated and the music sounded better than usual, like I was hearing each song for the first time. I spent some of the best hours of my life in this place, but now, in full daylight, it seems so tawdry. The murals look like a child drew them, the rugs and blankets are grimy, and the mirror behind the bar is cracked.

But when I look at my reflection, I don't look much better myself. I spent last night in a rest stop, barely sleeping, scared of every truck that pulled in beside me, and before the sun was even up I was washing the best I could in the women's room sink. Pulling my hair back and putting on the only makeup I could find in the Blackhawk, a single tube of lipstick that had been rolling around in the floor. Marilee's lipstick, as it turns out and now, as the sun streams in and hits the glass behind the bar, I can see it was a mistake. My mouth is bright pink, tropical, right for a black girl but all wrong for me. With my ponytail and pale skin and that single slash of color across my face, I look like a child who got caught playing in her mother's bathroom drawers.

Light is so ugly.

Shows the world that really is.

Me as I am too.

My extended silence must make him nervous, because Philip suddenly jerks into motion. He steps behind the grill, picks up the spatula, and begins scraping. Loud and systematically.

“You want something to eat?” he asks, tossing the words over his shoulder as he scrapes. It's a southern thing to automatically offer food as the solution to any problem. When I don't answer, he tries again. “What about a beer?”

“It's nine in the morning.”

“So it is. And I don't guess a beer's the best choice for a girl in your condition at any time of day. I assume you're keeping it?”

“Of course I'm going to keep it,” I say. “I don't know what you think of me, just because we met when I was traveling with Elvis, but that night—”

“That night was magic.” Despite everything, it still feels good to hear him say it.

“The King and his court,” Philip muses, opening the refrigerator and taking out a handful of jars and cartons, “come in their finery to our humble little village. Magicians and jesters, serving girls and princesses.” He looks up at me, his face suddenly radiant. “I was honored when you noticed me.”

He's cute when he smiles, and this pains me. The whole memory pains me.

“You trembled,” I say.

“I trembled?”

“That night. When you took my hand and pulled me in the back.”

“Well,” he says lightly, “if you say so.”

“Marilee didn't like you.”

He chuckles and turns back to the burgers. “Does Marilee ever like anybody?”

He has a point. “She said you were the kind of man who leeched off people's souls.”

“And yet she came here, didn't she? Sat down beside you on that very stool and ate a bowl of my chili. And Elvis was playing in the corner like a traveling troubadour . . . Do you remember what he sang?”

“No.”

“That's funny. Neither do I.”

“All I remember is that when he finished Marilee stood up and said, ‘Well, I leave you all to your mess,' and she stomped her way back to the
Lisa Marie
.”

“She wanted you to come with her.”

“But I didn't.”

“No,” he says, swiveling away from the grill as neatly as a dancer. “In fact, if memory serves, you stayed the whole night.” He's cooked me a double, or else he's planning to eat with me. Two patties are stacked on the spatula and they hover, almost reverently, in the air. He's serious about his food, even if nobody else around here is. In another life he might have been a chef, just like in another life I might have been a rock star in my own right, or a teacher or a pilot or Miss America or a nun.

Philip places both burgers on the grilled bun and adds a bit of his homemade relish, a concoction he makes every Sunday morning, using a recipe his grandma taught him years ago. It's one of the few things I know about him, one of the few stories we actually told each other on that dark and tangled night, but it shows what kind of man he really is, down deep in the heart. The stoners who eat here don't understand that the slow making of this Sunday relish is his personal sacrament. They see it as only one more sauce on a burger that is already dripping. They wipe it off their chins and keep consuming in that mind
less, openmouthed way we all have.
Send me more pleasure
, we all say.
And please, Lord, send it now.

“My family,” he says kind of vaguely, pausing to wipe his brow with a paisley dishrag. “They own half the town.”

“Right.”

“Not the good half. More like . . . this half.”

“Even so.”

“Everyone expects me to make something of myself. My uncle used to be mayor. Did I ever tell you that?”

“We didn't talk much.”

“No,” he says quietly. “I don't guess we did. But what I'm saying is that I come from good people. They think the way I'm living now is a stage. There are . . . there are expectations that I'll give all this up at some point.”

“And make something of yourself.”

“Yeah.”

He says it more like an apology than a brag and I know what he's really telling me. That he can't show up at Christmas dragging some nineteen-year-old girl who's a stranger to his people. Especially one carrying a baby who everybody knows can't be his.

“My life,” he adds slowly, almost idly,
“was written for me before I was born. I'm just turning the pages and living it, year by year. Do you know what that feels like, Honey—

“Berry. I'm Honey Berry. Actually I'm Laura Berry. From Beaufort, South Carolina. I have a name, you know. And a family of my own who expects something out of me.”

He pauses with the ketchup bottle poised above the burger and looks at me with lifted eyebrows, but I shake my head. Bot
tled ketchup from a plant somewhere in the Midwest would be a defilement considering everything this man and I have been through together, and I have a decision to make. I can hate him for what he can't be and for all the things he's not prepared to do, or I can take this fine burger—which has been made with care and love, despite it all—and head on down the highway. “Bag it,” I tell him.

“You're sure?”

“Yeah. If I drive straight, I can be home in two hours.”

Philip nods. He looks simultaneously relieved and sorry.

“Here,” he says, handing me the bag across the counter, along with a Styrofoam cup, which I didn't request but that he gives me anyway. I will be almost to the South Carolina state line before I realize that the cup holds milk. The goddess Lucy is smiling down at me from the wall. I never got exactly straight what she was the goddess of, or what kind of girl she has come to bless.

“It's on the house,” Philip adds, and then he looks away, as if he's ashamed of himself.

I slide off the stool with the bag in one hand and the cup in the other. Stumble toward the door and out into the parking lot. My eyes water as I walk, but I tell myself it must be the Vidalia onions. Or maybe it's the heat.