Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit (45 page)

“
Have you been here before?" I ask Chatter,
not hoping
for much in the way of lucid reply.

He takes a lope around the pool, those disgusting
knuckles brushing the pavement all the way around. He
stops, sits, and shimmies the lower half of his face from
side
to side, as if sniffing the air.

“No,"
he finally says.

I
gaze around, disappointed. This was where Crawfish Pukecannon—as I renamed him
long ago in honor of his
disagreeable
personality that begins to smell three
minutes
after you meet him—met up with me last. Or do
I mean three seconds? Anyway, where C. B. is lurking I
smell a
rat. It would help my little doll no end if I could do the dirty work and dig
up this rat without her mussing her dainty little high heels.

I admit to being disoriented in this garden. Someone
has
seeded the place with attractive but stinky plants. It
smells like the respiratory infection remedy shelf of your
local
discount pharmacy.

I mean, menthol and mint, lemon and licorice, and not
a
snippet of catnip.

I
am not at my best when getting a sick headache from innocuous medicinal herbs.

But does this atmosphere bother the affable Chatter?
No
way.

He bounds around, jumping from the top of one see-
through
plastic coffin to another, gazing at the garish suits within and shrieking with
laughter.

I
cannot blame him. Compared to the modestly jeweled
jumpsuit he is wearing, these laid-out ones are over the
top and
around your block. They shine under the artificial dome light, a shifting sky
of white clouds that take on the
faces of the
principal players in the Elvis Presley
saga
. . . Mama Gladys, Daddy Vernon. Baby brother
Jesse Garon is a cute little unformed fluffy cloud attached
to Mama and Daddy, I guess. There's a big blue thun
derhead that is either Colonel Parker or the three
Mem
phis Mafia members who wrote the
first tell-all book, Red
and Sonny
West and Dave Hebler, all melded together
to
look
like Colonel Parker, another villain of the piece. There
is a Priscilla cloud, an all-white thunderhead that
must be all hair, and a whole bunch of babe clouds
who
are pretty fluffy in all the right places.

Of course, this is a subtle effect, and I do not spy Lisa
Marie's cats among the heavenly cavorters, although
I
spot a few horses.

Chatter has been silent for a while now, so I get my
head out of the heavens and back down to earth.
And
I do mean earth.

In
the two minutes I have let my attention wander, my
chattering charge has been up to major mischief.
I gaze aghast at
the ground.

This is the damage the unfettered opposable thumb
can
do.

Chatter has worried at the ground opposite the tasteful
Elvis funeral suit display, tossing foul herbal
plants aside
like weeds (I cannot blame him for that) and uncovering
something buried just deep enough to need a demented chimpanzee to unearth it.

It is a pale limb. It is soft and limp. As I stare, bemused,
for I have never witnessed the de-burying of a
body be
fore, I see that it is not
bone, but the flared sleeve of a
white
jumpsuit, encrusted with faux gemstones embed
ded in genuine dirt.

Speaking of dirt, Chatter has got it all over his own
white
jumpsuit.

And I think he has become a little too excited at the discovery. My
sniffer tells me someone should change his diaper.

I will leave the disposition of
that
to the proper
author
ities.

As for the jumpsuit in the herb garden, is it Elvis or is
it
Memorex?

Chapter 44

Also Sprach Zarathustra

(The Richard Strauss piece whose thundering
drum
overture was so effective in 1968's
futuristic film,
2001:A
Space Odyssey;
Elvis
used it to open his live
concerts beginning in
1972, and on many albums)

"Two
nights running, no Elvis." Leticia's mellow voice sharpened with
disappointment.

She had just finished her five-hour on-air shift as De
lilah
and now was switching her performer's beret for a producer's hard hat. "I
don't get it," she added.

“
We play the passive part in this charade,"
Matt
pointed out. "We sit here
and wait. People choose to call
in. Or not.”

Leticia's
frown carved no parallel tracks between her
brows,
merely a fleeting ripple in her mocha skin.
"What's not to call in for? We're a feel-good station.
You're a feel-good radio shrink. That Elvis guy was
get
ting a lot of reaction, not to mention ink."

“He
was getting us a lot of reaction and ink. Maybe
`Elvis' is tired of notoriety. Or maybe ... maybe he
can't
call."

“
What do you mean? Someone is holding him pris
oner?"

“Leticia!
You're buying into all those Extreme Elvis
scenarios.
As if he's really still alive and out there, and
no theory is too wild about what might have happened to him or what he
might be doing now. This caller was
just
a guy with an Elvis fetish, indulging his mania and
getting lots of the
attention he craves."

“So
why'd he give it up then?”

Matt sat at the desk and took up the headphones she
had abandoned. The schoolhouse clock said he had less
than a minute to contemplate the absence of Elvis. Then
he'd have to get on with what he was here for: talking
to
real people. "Maybe he died."

“Funnee
man."

“
No, really. A guy in an Elvis suit was found
floating
in the Kingdome pool the day
before yesterday."
"I haven't heard anything; how did
you?"

“
I know the two women who found him. And there
was an obscure article in the paper. Oh, and for
the weird
set, a huge anaconda was floating in the pool with him."

“It
was dead too?"

“No,
quite alive. In fact, it's a suspect."

“
What the hell's an anaconda doing in a Kingdome
pool?"

“There's
an exhibit of animals associated with Elvis.
Apparently
an anaconda was one of them. Don't ask me
why."

“An
anaconda . . ." Leticia's dark eyes glittered with possibilities.

“
Don't tell me: if a snake calls tonight, I'm to
keep it
on the line as long as possible. Even if it lisps.”

The first three callers wanted to know the same thing
Leticia
did: Where was Elvis?

“He
doesn't give me his touring schedule, you know,”

Matt
answered wryly. "And it's a bad idea to believe
everything you hear."

“You call him 'Elvis.'
"

“
I call him what he implies he is. We're strangers. I
owe him at
least that courtesy."

“
Howard Stern would be calling him a sicko ghoul
who needs to ride on a corpse's reputation, and a
lot
worse."

“
Maybe that's why he didn't call Howard Stern."
The next
caller was less accusing. "Just tell him that
we miss him and would like to hear from him again."
A third
caller wanted to get into the Existential Elvis. "You know, everybody is
either ready to believe it has to be Elvis, or angry that it can't possibly be
Elvis,”

she said. "What if it's
something in between?" "Semi-Elvis?" Matt asked.

“
How about semisolid Elvis? He was a recording art
ist, after all. Maybe the airwaves were always the
best
way to deal with Elvis. It
doesn't matter what he wears
or how much he weighs, it just matters how
he sings."

“That's the beauty of radio.
Image is nothing."

“
It's the perfect medium for Elvis: voice is all. And that's what he
really cared about—the music and how
he sang it. The rest was just
distraction."

“
The rest was destructive. But even today a rock star
has to tour to keep the fan base. We want our
performers
live and in person."

“
They say by the year twenty-twenty we'll have Vir
tual communication. Like the holodeck of
Star
Trek's
starship
Enterprise."

“
Maybe by then you can visit
with Virtual Elvis at Graceland."

“Are you sure this whole
'Elvis calling' thing isn't a promotional gimmick for the Kingdome
opening?"

“No," Matt said,
"I'm not. But who ever is sure about anything connected with Elvis?"

“
That's some achievement," the woman mused,
"when you
think about it. To have made such an impact
that
even after your death endless scenarios seem pos
sible. At least to some
people."

“
Elvis struck me as both
pretentious and unpreten
tious, and the
ways he was pretentious were the ways
we
all might go overboard if we had the opportunities he did. That's what's wrong
with some people making
him into a
god. He had such predictably human failings.
The same ones teenage
sports stars show today. It's more
instructive
to regard him as a man gone wrong, not a
god betrayed."

“
'Instructive.' Gee whiz, Mr. Midnight, do you know
how odd it is to
hear that word on talk radio?"
"Sorry."

“
Don't be. Elvis would
like that word. That's what
his spiritual quest was, to find some way he
could inspire
people beyond moving them with
his music. Some way
to use that remarkable power."

“I
have to say that the Rolling Stones don't seem too
concerned about using their remarkable drawing power
for anything other than what was the darker side of
El
vis: sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll."

“
No, Elvis was peculiarly American, both idealistic
and egotistical."

“
Do you know how
_,
rarely the word
'peculiarly' is
heard on talk radio?”

She
chuckled. "Bingo! I'd better get back to my Elvis-channeling sessions. Say
hi to the King for me.”

Matt
was happy that the audience was mellowing, ac
cepting
that the caller, whoever he was, could go as sud
denly as he had come. Whatever the so-called Elvis had
done or not done, he had certainly kept the phone
lines
ringing at WCOO.

“
Mr. Midnight? Are you still on? I kinda lost track
of
time. Sometimes I do that.”

That familiar easygoing voice made Matt sit up ram
rod straight, as if he were on television and had to look
alert. "I figured you weren't going to call
again."

“
Heck, man. Who else am I
gonna call? Ghostbusters?”

The caller's hearty laughter faded into worn-out
wheezes. He sounded like a punch-drunk kid who'd
stayed
up late for too many pizza nights in a row.

“
Give it up, man," Matt urged. "You're not
a ghost.
There's not even a ghost of
a chance that you're who
you claim to be. You don't have to be
Elvis."

“
Yeah, I do." Rage drove a baritone-deep spike
into
the soft, Southern underbelly of the tenor voice Matt was
used to hearing. "I can't help who I was born
as. Can't
help that God chose me to be Elvis Presley."