The Best of Joe R. Lansdale (5 page)

He hoped not. That was the worst of it. A doll like that handling him without warmth or emotion. Twenty years ago, just twenty, he could have made with the curled lip smile and had her eating out of his asshole. Where had his youth gone? Why hadn’t fame denied old age and death, and why had he left his fame in the first place, and did he want it back, and could he have it back, and if he could, would it make any difference?

And finally, when he was evacuated from the bowels of life into the toilet bowl of the beyond and was flushed, would the great sewer pipe flow him to the other side where God would — in the guise of a great all-seeing turd with corn kernel eyes — be waiting with open turd arms, and would there be amongst the sewage his mother (bless her fat little heart) and father and friends, waiting with fried peanut butter and ‘nanner sandwiches and ice cream cones, predigested, or course?

He was reflecting on this, pondering the afterlife, when Bull gave out with a hell of a scream, pooched his eyes damn near out of his head, arched his back, grease-farted like a blast from Gabriel’s trumpet, and checked his tired old soul out of the Mud Creek Shady Grove Convalescence Home; flushed it on out and across the great shitty beyond.

Later that day, Elvis lay sleeping, his lips fluttering the bad taste of lunch—steamed zucchini and boiled peas — out of his belly. He awoke to a noise, rolled over to see a young attractive woman cleaning out Bull’s dresser drawer. The curtains over the window next to Bull’s bed were pulled wide open, and the sunlight was cutting through it and showing her to great advantage. She was blonde and Nordic-featured and her long hair was tied back with a big red bow and she wore big, gold, hoop earrings that shimmered in the sunlight. She was dressed in a white blouse and a short black skirt and dark hose and high heels. The heels made her ass ride up beneath her skirt like soft bald baby heads under a thin blanket.

She had a big, yellow plastic trashcan and she had one of Bull’s dresser drawers pulled out, and she was picking through it, like a magpie looking for bright things. She found a few coins, a pocket knife, a cheap watch. These were plucked free and laid on the dresser top, then the remaining contents of the drawer — Bull’s photographs of himself when young, a rotten pack of rubbers (wishful thinking never deserted Bull), a bronze star and a Purple Heart from his performance in the Vietnam War — were dumped into the trashcan with a bang and a flutter.

Elvis got hold of his bed lift button and raised himself for a better look. The woman had her back to him now, and didn’t notice. She was replacing the dresser drawer and pulling out another. It was full of clothes. She took out the few shirts and pants and socks and underwear, and laid them on Bull’s bed remade now, and minus Bull, who had been toted off to be taxidermied, embalmed, burned up, whatever.

“You’re gonna toss that stuff,” Elvis said. “Could I have one of them pictures of Bull? Maybe that Purple Heart? He was proud of it.”

The young woman turned and looked at him, “I suppose,” she said. She went to the trashcan and bent over it and showed her black panties to Elvis as she rummaged. He knew the revealing of her panties was neither intentional or unintentional. She just didn’t give a damn. She saw him as so physically and sexually non-threatening, she didn’t mind if he got a bird’s-eye view of her; it was the same to her as a house cat sneaking a peek.

Elvis observed the thin panties straining and slipping into the caverns of her ass cheeks and felt his pecker flutter once, like a bird having a heart attack, then it laid down and remained limp and still.

Well, these days, even a flutter was kind of reassuring.

The woman surfaced from the trashcan with a photo and the Purple Heart, went over to Elvis’s bed and handed them to him.

Elvis dangled the ribbon that held the Purple Heart between his fingers, said, “Bull your kin?”

“My daddy,” she said.

“I haven’t seen you here before.”

“Only been here once before,” she said. “When I checked him in.”

“Oh,” Elvis said. “That was three years ago, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Were you and him friends?”

Elvis considered the question. He didn’t know the real answer. All he knew was Bull listened to him when he said he was Elvis Presley and seemed to believe him. If he didn’t believe him, he at least had the courtesy not to patronize. Bull always called him Elvis, and before Bull grew too ill, he always played cards and checkers with him.

“Just roommates,” Elvis said. “He didn’t feel good enough to say much. I just sort of hated to see what was left of him go away so easy. He was an all right guy. He mentioned you a lot. You’re Callie, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Well, he was all right.”

“Not enough you came and saw him though.”

“Don’t try to put some guilt trip on me, Mister. I did what I could. Hadn’t been for Medicaid, Medicare, whatever that stuff was, he’d have been in a ditch somewhere. I didn’t have the money to take care of him.”

Elvis thought of his own daughter, lost long ago to him. If she knew he lived, would she come to see him? Would she care? He feared knowing the answer.

“You could have come and seen him,” Elvis said.

“I was busy. Mind your own business. Hear?”

The chocolate-skin nurse with the grapefruit tits came in. Her white uniform crackled like cards being shuffled. Her little white nurse hat was tilted on her head in a way that said she loved mankind and made good money and was getting regular dick. She smiled at Callie and then at Elvis. “How are you this morning, Mr. Haff?”

“All right,” Elvis said. “But I prefer Mr. Presley. Or Elvis. I keep telling you that. I don’t go by Sebastian Haff anymore. I don’t try to hide anymore.”

“Why, of course,” said the pretty nurse. “I knew that. I forgot. Good morning, Elvis.”

Her voice dripped with sorghum syrup. Elvis wanted to hit her with his bed pan.

The nurse said to Callie: “Did you know we have a celebrity here, Miss Jones? Elvis Presley. You know, the rock and roll singer?”

“I’ve heard of him,” Callie said. “I thought he was dead.”

Callie went back to the dresser and squatted and set to work on the bottom drawer. The nurse looked at Elvis and smiled again, only she spoke to Callie. “Well, actually, Elvis is dead, and Mr. Haff knows that, don’t you, Mr. Haff?”

“Hell no,” said Elvis. “I’m right here. I ain’t dead, yet.”

“Now, Mr. Haff, I don’t mind calling you Elvis, but you’re a little confused, or like to play sometimes. You were an Elvis impersonator. Remember? You fell off a stage and broke your hip. What was it…Twenty years ago? It got infected and you went into a coma for a few years. You came out with a few problems.”

“I was impersonating myself,” Elvis said. “I couldn’t do nothing else. I haven’t got any problems. You’re trying to say my brain is messed up, aren’t you?”

Callie quit cleaning out the bottom drawer of the dresser. She was interested now, and though it was no use, Elvis couldn’t help but try and explain who he was, just one more time. The explaining had become a habit, like wanting to smoke a cigar long after the enjoyment of it was gone.

“I got tired of it all,” he said. “I got on drugs, you know. I wanted out. Fella named Sebastian Haff, an Elvis imitator, the best of them. He took my place. He had a bad heart and he liked drugs, too. It was him died, not me. I took his place.”

“Why would you want to leave all that fame,” Callie said, “all that money?” and she looked at the nurse, like
Let’s humor the old fart for a lark
.

“‘Cause it got old. Woman I loved, Priscilla, she was gone. Rest of the women…were just women. The music wasn’t mine anymore. I wasn’t even me anymore. I was this thing they made up. Friends were sucking me dry. I got away and liked it, left all the money with Sebastian, except for enough to sustain me if things got bad. We had a deal, me and Sebastian. When I wanted to come back, he’d let me. It was all written up in a contract in case he wanted to give me a hard time, got to liking my life too good. Thing was, copy of the contract I had got lost in a trailer fire. I was living simple. Way Haff had been. Going from town to town doing the Elvis act. Only I felt like I was really me again. Can you dig that?”

“We’re digging it, Mr. Haff…Mr. Presley,” said the pretty nurse.

“I was singing the old way. Doing some new songs. Stuff I wrote. I was getting attention on a small but good scale. Women throwing themselves at me, ‘cause they could imagine I was Elvis — only I was Elvis, playing Sebastian Haff playing Elvis… It was all pretty good. I didn’t mind the contract being burned up. I didn’t even try to go back and convince anybody. Then I had the accident. Like I was saying, I’d laid up a little money in case of illness, stuff like that. That’s what’s paying for here. These nice facilities. Ha!”

“Now, Elvis,” the nurse said. “Don’t carry it too far. You may just get way out there and not come back.”

“Oh fuck you,” Elvis said.

The nurse giggled.

Shit
, Elvis thought.
Get old, you can’t even cuss somebody and have it bother them. Everything you do is either worthless or sadly amusing
.

“You know, Elvis,” said the pretty nurse, “we have a Mr. Dillinger here too. And a President Kennedy. He says the bullet only wounded him and his brain is in a fruit jar at the White House, hooked up to some wires and a battery, and as long as the battery works, he can walk around without it. His brain, that is. You know, he says everyone was in on trying to assassinate him. Even Elvis Presley.”

“You’re an asshole,” Elvis said.

“I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, Mr. Haff,” the nurse said. “I’m merely trying to give you a reality check.”

“You can shove that reality check right up your pretty black ass,” Elvis said.

The nurse made a sad little snicking sound. “Mr. Haff, Mr. Haff. Such language.”

“What happened to get you here?” said Callie. “Say you fell off a stage?”

“I was gyrating,” Elvis said. “Doing ‘Blue Moon,’ but my hip went out. I’d been having trouble with it.” Which was quite true. He’d sprained it making love to a blue-haired old lady with ELVIS tattooed on her fat ass. He couldn’t help himself from wanting to fuck her. She looked like his mother, Gladys.

“You swiveled right off the stage?” Callie said. “Now that’s sexy.”

Elvis looked at her. She was smiling. This was great fun for her, listening to some nut tell a tale. She hadn’t had this much fun since she put her old man in the rest home.

“Oh, leave me the hell alone,” Elvis said.

The women smiled at one another, passing a private joke. Callie said to the nurse: “I’ve got what I want.” She scraped the bright things off the top of Bull’s dresser into her purse. “The clothes can go to Goodwill or the Salvation Army.”

The pretty nurse nodded to Callie. “Very well. And I’m very sorry about your father. He was a nice man.”

“Yeah,” said Callie, and she started out of there. She paused at the foot of Elvis’s bed. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Presley.”

“Get the hell out,” Elvis said.

“Now, now,” said the pretty nurse, patting his foot through the covers, as if it were a little cantankerous dog. “I’ll be back later to do that…little thing that has to be done. You know?”

“I know,” Elvis said, not liking the words “little thing.”

Callie and the nurse started away then, punishing him with the clean lines of their faces and the sheen of their hair, the jiggle of their asses and tits. When they were out of sight, Elvis heard them laugh about something in the hall, then they were gone, and Elvis felt as if he were on the far side of Pluto without a jacket. He picked up the ribbon with the Purple Heart and looked at it.

Poor Bull. In the end, did anything really matter?

Meanwhile…

The Earth swirled around the sun like a spinning turd in the toilet bowl (to keep up with Elvis’s metaphors) and the good old abused Earth clicked about on its axis and the hole in the ozone spread slightly wider, like a shy lady fingering open her vagina, and the South American trees that had stood for centuries, were visited by the dozer, the chainsaw and the match, and they rose up in burned black puffs that expanded and dissipated into minuscule wisps, and while the puffs of smoke dissolved, there were
IRA
bombings in London, and there was more war in the Mideast. Blacks died in Africa of famine, the HIV virus infected a million more, the Dallas Cowboys lost again, and that Ole Blue Moon that Elvis and Patsy Cline sang so well about, swung around the Earth and came in close and rose over the Shady Grove Convalescent Home, shone its bittersweet, silver-blue rays down on the joint like a flashlight beam shining through a blue-haired lady’s do, and inside the rest home, evil waddled about like a duck looking for a spot to squat, and Elvis rolled over in his sleep and awoke with the intense desire to pee.

All right
, thought Elvis.
This time I make it
. No more piss or crap in the bed. (Famous last words.)

Elvis sat up and hung his feet over the side of the bed and the bed swung far to the left and around the ceiling and back, and then it wasn’t moving at all. The dizziness passed.

Elvis looked at his walker and sighed, leaned forward, took hold of the grips and eased himself off the bed and clumped the rubber padded tips forward, and made for the toilet.

He was in the process of milking his bump-swollen weasel, when he heard something in the hallway — a kind of scrambling, like a big spider scuttling about in a box of gravel.

There was always some sound in the hallway, people coming and going, yelling in pain or confusion, but this time of night, three
A.M.
, was normally quite dead.

It shouldn’t have concerned him, but the truth of the matter was, now that he was up and had successfully pissed in the pot, he was no longer sleepy; he was still thinking about that bimbo, Callie, and the nurse (What the hell was her name?) with the tits like grapefruits, and all they had said.

Elvis stumped his walker backwards out of the bathroom, turned it, made his way forward into the hall. The hall was semi-dark, with every other light out, and the lights that were on were dimmed to a watery egg yoke yellow. The black and white tile floor looked like a great chessboard, waxed and buffed for the next game of life, and here he was, a semi-crippled pawn, ready to go. Off in the far wing of the home, Old Lady McGee, better known in the home as The Blue Yodeler, broke into one of her famous yodels (she claimed to have sung with a country and western band in her youth), then ceased abruptly. Elvis swung the walker forward and moved on. He hadn’t been out of his room in ages, and he hadn’t been out of his bed much either. Tonight, he felt invigorated because he hadn’t pissed his bed, and he’d heard the sound again, the spider in the box of gravel. (Big spider. Big box. Lots of gravel.) And following the sound gave him something to do.