Losing Graceland (10 page)

“Plan it anyway,” she said. “That way you’ll have no choice. I’m serious. Take a bartending job for a few months and book your ticket. I’ll give you my cousin’s e-mail—he knows some real-estate agents there.”

“Okay.”

Alex gave him a wary side-glance. “You won’t do it.”

“Sure I will.”

“No, you won’t. Everyone talks but no one does.”

“I don’t need the bartending job. The old man’s paying me ten grand to drop him off in Memphis.”

“Ten
grand
? Just for driving him to Memphis?”

“It’s crazy. He’s already paid me half.”

Alex shook her head. “That is crazy. So do you really think he’s Elvis?”

Ben folded his arms atop the bar and leaned over his
margarita. “I don’t know. He sang at this karaoke contest and people were shoving each other to get close to the stage. And it wasn’t like they were watching a freak show. It was like they wanted to believe it was really him.”

“But do you?”

“I think he’s a little nuts. Not that Elvis wasn’t.”

“There is something about him,” Alex said. “But if that’s really Elvis”—she nodded at the booth where the old man sat with Heather. They were both laughing as Fiona danced to Al Green’s “Look What You Done for Me”—“then we should call the
Enquirer
or something. They’d pay us ten million dollars for that scoop.”

“I could buy an estate in Amsterdam,” Ben said. “You could visit with your friends. Only your girlfriends, of course.”

Alex grinned and took another long sip from her glass. “I don’t think my boyfriend would like that.”

“Tell him I’m harmless.” Ben laughed and caught himself. Easy, there, he thought. Kittens and string.

Alex put down her drink and stretched her arms overhead. Her tank lifted a little; Ben caught a glimpse of her flat, tanned stomach.

“Come dance with me.” She grabbed Ben’s hand and pulled him from the bar.

“I can’t dance like Fiona,” he said.

“Good. You’d look like a girl suffering for male attention.”

They danced, and at some point Heather was near them, twirling with her arms held out while she shut her eyes. The old man sat in the booth and drank as Fiona dropped to the floor and tried to stand on her head, before tottering over and crashing into a chair.

She sat up in a tumble of thick dark hair and the biggest mouth Ben had ever seen, screaming with laughter as tears ran down her freckled cheeks. Heather kept her eyes shut, twirling like a dervish surfer girl. Alex snaked her arms around Ben from behind, and he realized he didn’t know if he’d left his cell phone on, but he didn’t care.

he old man waited outside the roadside bar with one leg propped on the porch railing. It was still raining, fat drops
plink-plinking
in parking lot puddles and tapping on the hood of his Caddy. Clouds the color of wet cement sat in a line atop a ridge of forested mountains, darkening as the sun set. The old man tried rolling a bottle cap across his knuckles, but his fingers had grown stiff with arthritis and the joints felt like they were stuffed with glue. He stared at the back of his hands, wrinkled skin as old as anything he’d ever seen.

He was content to think of nothing. Just sit back like a dog waiting for its master to return home. He heard Ben laughing with the three beautiful ladies. Good for him, the old man thought. Boy is carrying around some goddamn weight that he can’t figure. Too serious for someone his age. Reminded the old man of himself, an impatient tragedian who looked for meaning the moment he understood he’d get old and die. The moment his mother got pale and quiet and the adults bowed their heads, silent in the way animals get before a storm.

Two days after his mother’s death, Hank Rickey had come to the house while he lamented in his room. Besides his father, Hank was the only one he allowed to sit across from him and hold his hand while he sobbed so hard he thought he’d puke up his stomach—orange juice, pills, squirmy wet sack, and all.

He was twenty-three going on twelve and his mother was dead. He knew his mother never liked his music, the crowds, or the girls he flirted with but never so much as stuck a finger in, and his father never amounted to any sort of an opinion, content to go whichever way, like sea grass in the tide. But as hard as it was, he told Hank, he had to keep on because of the
obligation
. The obligation to what he saw as his destiny. Who else could serve God’s will? Who else had that hunger that could only come from a childhood of poverty and mother-fed narcissism? And for fuck’s sake, who else had that hair and those puppy dog eyes?

I do, Hank said. I could take your place.

The old man remembered looking at Hank through the blur of tears, his handsome face distorted into a demon’s mask: one eye higher than the other, full lips yanked into a cruel sneer. How in the hell could you do that? the old man remembered asking. You’ve given your life over to God and I’ve already got a couple gold singles under my belt.

Six months with my voice and the fans won’t remember you, Hank had said. Only if you want, of course. Otherwise, I’m content doing what I’m doing.

The old man remembered his terror that night when the house quieted and the candles were snuffed. He lay alone in a grotesque mound of teddy bears, those gruesome fucking things with their mannequin eyes and outstretched limbs. Since that
stupid song they’d never stopped coming via crate and mail, thrown over the gates of his home at all hours.

I could take your place, Hank had said. And the terror was that he could. Better face, better voice, better hair, better everything. It had all been Hank’s. The hip swivel. The sneer. The gum-chewing, microphone-belching, pink-Cadillac-driving, rambling rockabilly swagger. Hank invented it all for an audience of one, for the kid with the shock of thick black hair and a high wavery voice, and Hank had told the kid he could take whatever he liked because it meant nothing anymore, not since God zapped Himself into that oil slick and demanded he live a chaste life.

That night, lying among the teddy bears, the old man resolved that if Hank ever renounced his vow and laid claim to his rightful place atop the world—and he remembered that despite everything he still considered his success the greatest con perpetrated since Judas shared matzoh with Jesus—he’d shoot Hank dead. Else the whole motherfucking party would be shut down in the time it takes the DJ to put the needle on the record.

An AMC Gremlin pulled up to the Coyote Café, tires crackling over wet gravel. The old man snapped out of his reverie and reached for his wallet. A young man stepped out of the car. He wore a jean jacket, hair straight and long down the back of his neck.

“You John Barrow?”

The old man held up a thick fold of bills. “You Luke?”

“That’s right.” Luke stepped onto the porch. He took the money and counted it slowly, licking his fingers.

“The bartender promised me good product,” the old man said.

“No worries. I’ve known Jimmy for years.”

“Years, huh. How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

When Luke finished counting he fished a small orange plastic bottle from the pocket of his jean jacket and handed it over. The old man shook a handful of pills into his wrinkled palm.

“These blue ones Darvocet?”

“That’s right.”

“It doesn’t say Darvocet.”

“They’re generic.”

“I suppose that Placidyl’s generic, too.”

“Placi-what?”

The old man shook his head. “Goddammit, if I wanted generic, I’d have ordered this shit from Canada.” He starting pacing, and his shirt lifted a little, flashing the pistol tucked into his waistband. “Just what the hell am I supposed to do with a bunch of no-name pills?”

Luke held up his hands, backing down the porch steps.

“The problem, Luke—you listening?—is we don’t know if the lab techs put the right meds into the right containers. And don’t tell me there’s no difference between Dilaudid and Lortab and Phenobarbital, because there’s contraindications to consider. There’s the issue of dosage and timing, tolerance and allergy. People pay good money for name brands because they like to know what they’re getting, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to depend on some fucking Canuck that doesn’t know the difference between a barbiturate and an opioid. You get me?”

“Hey, no problem.” Luke dropped the fold of bills onto a step. “My mistake, so it’s free of charge.”

The old man frowned. “I don’t want a refund. I want what I paid for.”

“I’ll send someone. You keep those and I’ll send someone with name brands.”

“Promise?”

Luke nodded and hurried into his car. As he peeled away the old man bent to retrieve the money, slowly, hands on his lower back. He knew the hippie was lying. He’d send no one. Those days were long gone. Those days when he could pick up the phone at three in the morning and have a private nurse at his bedroom door in less than an hour, wearing sheer thigh-highs and carrying a purse full of goodies.

These will have to do, the old man said to himself, and he pinched a wad of pills from his palm, dry-swallowing them with a practiced wince. Then he leaned against the porch railing and whistled an old Rufus Thomas tune.

They sat in the corner booth. Heather slumped against the wall, eyes closed. Fiona flirted with a tall man in a cowboy hat at the end of the bar. Ben stared into his glass, at twin slivers of floating ice. Alex rested her head on his shoulder and spun her empty glass round and round.

“I think about her all the time,” Ben said. “I don’t want to but I can’t help it. It’s like every day that passes is a little death—another day we’re not together, another day she’s talking with somebody else. I can see years from now when we’re both old photos in each other’s minds—”

“I hate photos,” Alex said. “Every time someone shows me pictures of places they’ve been and people they know, it’s like listening to an inside joke. I don’t get it.”

“Maybe Jess will regret leaving me and maybe she won’t,” Ben said. “But I’ll always wonder. That’s what kills me.”

“You might not always wonder.”

“I will.”

“You might not. I don’t regret leaving Derek.”

Ben laughed to himself. “If I see a pretty girl standing in line at the grocery store, I wonder what it would be like if we got married. When she leaves the store I wonder if I’ll ever see her again. It’s like I get nostalgic for experiences I never had. I’ve already planned our little tragedy: Boy meets hot girl in some roadside bar, they drink, they talk, boy leaves because he’s made a promise to an old man. But boy always wonders about that hot girl, and one day, years later, he returns to the roadside bar, looking for her. But she’s long gone.”

Alex yawned, readjusting her head on his shoulder. “Maybe you like being sad.”

“No. I hate being sad. I hate being wounded.”

“But society wants you to be sad,” said Alex. “After my mom died I realized it’s one of the few times in life when total self-absorption is considered okay. If you’re happily self-absorbed, you’re an asshole, but if you’re sad … Hey, people may not want to be around you, but at least you don’t threaten their delusions by being all happy. There’s a whole culture built around sadness. It makes you feel like a part of something bigger. That’s why they have grief counseling groups, and support groups where people share their sorrows. There aren’t any happy groups, where people meet every week and tell each other all the great things that happened since the last meeting. And don’t tell me it’s because most of our life is suffering. They don’t have happy groups because nobody wants to hear how happy your week was.”

Ben swirled his rum and Coke, listening to the ice clink. “How did your mom die?”

“Cancer. How about your dad?”

Ben took a sip and spit it back into the glass. “Car accident.”

“This is where you say let’s get out of here,” Alex said.

“I can’t.”

“Because it’s not in your little tragedy.”

“Because the old man is crazy about getting to Memphis. I haven’t had a full night’s sleep since we left. He’ll want to keep driving through the night.”

“I see.”

“We should meet up in Memphis, though. Or Amsterdam.”

“Maybe,” Alex said.

“Shit,” Ben said. “Did I blow it?”

Alex sat up and kissed him, long enough to show him what he was missing. When she finished she pulled away, his mouth still open, and she said, “You did, but I’ll let it slide.”

Then she stood, slowly, holding on to the seat-back for balance, and slinked her way across the bar, disappearing into the bathroom.

Ben closed his eyes. One week ago if a woman with long blond hair, sparkling blue eyes, and a fearless kind of tomboy sexiness had pulled him onto a roadhouse dance floor with her hot, drunk friends, he would have driven his Honda hatchback through a nursery school to follow that woman wherever she was headed.

But not now, he thought. His world was shrinking. Just him, the old man, and their Caddy. A mission from God, the old man had said, and Ben didn’t believe him but it began to sound good. Good because it was something different.

I’m doing something greater than looking for random hookups, Ben thought. I’m on an actual mission. The first mission of my life. It’s something people want to be a part of. But it’s just us.