Last Ride to Graceland (11 page)

Eddie picks up the cartridge and considers it from all angles. “I don't think I can fix it,” he says.

“You sign says you can fix everything.”

“Maybe it should say I can fix everything made in this century.”

“Come on,” I say with a pointed look at the television, which is at least as old as God. “I'm not expecting miracles. Can't you splice it, or whatever the word is? I'll take anything you come up with, even a snippet.”

“Mind if I crack the case?”

“Be my guest.”

He picks up a hammer and taps his way around the edges
of the cartridge, which obligingly splits at every corner. And once he has the top off I can see that a fair amount of the tape is still spooled and my heart lifts.

“I can't do much with these little giblets,” Eddie says, one eye still on Lucy. “And if you expect me to connect the strips that have come off the spool . . . they might not end up in the right order. How'd you say it got damaged?”

“The player in my car.”

He squints out the door and beholds the Blackhawk sitting in all its glory, glittering in the morning sun. I expect some sort of reaction, maybe a cavalcade of questions, but he merely takes it in and then shrugs.

“If the car chewed it up once, what's to say it won't chew it up again?”

An excellent point. “Is there anywhere in town,” I ask, “where I might purchase an eight-track player?”

“Joe's Vintage and Salvage,” he says promptly. “It's on Freemason's Street in Fairhope. I'm not saying they'd have one for sure but they specialize in . . . vintage and salvage.”

“Sounds fair. Look, I need to go next door to the post office for a minute. Do you mind if I leave my dog with you?”

He looks warily at Lucy. “It's Sunday. The post office is closed.”

“So why are you open?”

“I wasn't open. I was watching ESPN Classic. The sign on the door was turned to Closed, but you came in anyway.”

“The post office is bound to open tomorrow.”

“That's Memorial Day.”

“Ah yes. So it is. But the day after that is a regular old Tues
day and they've got to open eventually, don't they? What I'm asking is, do you happen to have some sort of big box laying around anywhere? Big enough to ship a man's pair of wader boots? You know, those boots that go up as high as your hips?”

I'm clearly the worst thing that's happened to Eddie in months. He looks at the dog and sighs, then he looks out the door at the car and sighs again. Then he says, “I think I have a weed whacker box laying around here somewhere.”

“That would be perfect,” I say. “You're a saint.” This man is the Wild Acres, Alabama, answer to Leary Dupree, that much is obvious, and experience has taught me that men who promise the least usually deliver the most, so the more Eddie predicts trouble the more I'm starting to trust him. He goes in the back and returns with the box, dusty but ample in size. I loop Lucy's leash around the handle of a nearby lawnmower and fish around in my backpack until I find the last of the waffles I snitched from the La Quinta buffet. I throw it at him and he snags it in midair. He may not be the smartest or the prettiest dog in America, but he does seem to have real good depth perception.

“If I get these pieces together, which I'm not saying I can,” Eddie mutters, ironing little bits of the tape flat with the tip of his finger, “they might not end up in the right order.”

“You already said so. And that's okay. I wasn't planning to sing along with it.”

“It's music?”

“I think it might be the last live recording of Elvis Presley.”

“Elvis Presley?” he says, looking up, and he's so surprised that he's not even deterred by the sight of Lucy dragging the
lawn mower around behind him like Santa's sleigh, zigging first one direction and then the other. “How'd you get your hands on something like that?” And then, almost immediately, realization begins to dawn across this features. “Is that Elvis's own car?”

“I think so. I just found it. My mama was one of his backup singers on his last tour.”

“Like Marilee.”

“Pardon?”

“Marilee Jones. She owns the Bay Restaurant. She was a backup singer for Elvis years ago and she's got a voice—”

“Is she black?”

“As much as I am. She's my aunt. Actually, she's my cousin's aunt on the other side, twice removed. But I always see her at Christmas, if you know what I mean.”

I know exactly what he means, and lights are beginning to come on in the back of my head as well. “You say this Marilee Jones owns the . . .”

“The Bay Restaurant. It's a restaurant on the bay. Right on top of the water. She's the cook there too. Cook and singer and owner and everything.”

“I believe I may have a picture of her,” I say as Lucy lurches and pulls the lawn mower over, then turns in a snarling fury and tries to bite it. I rummage around in the backpack again and hand him the snapshot. Eddie takes one look at it and laughs.

“She lost the Afro a while back and I've never known her to wear a turquoise jumpsuit, but yeah. That's Marilee.”

“The girl with her is my mother.”

He glances up. “I can see that.”

“Look,” I say. “Thank you kindly for the box and I will reimburse you for it, as well as any work you do on the tape, when I come back. You've been more help than you could possibly know. As for now, I've got to find the Bay Restaurant and Joe's Salvage and Vintage.”

“Vintage and Salvage.”

“Right. When do you figure the tape will be ready?”

He sighs again. He's a sigher. Of course, so was the politician back in Macon and my mother too, and even Leary, come to think of it. Maybe there's just something about me that makes people sigh. But my head is clearing and I feel for the first time since I looked in Bradley's shed like I know where the next step is going to lead me.

“I was planning to go surf fishing. I was planning to knock off early for Memorial Day weekend.”

“Then why are you watching ESPN Classic in your shop?”

“I live in the back.”

“It won't take you two whole days,” I say, and I know I'm wheedling, but I can't seem to stop myself. “Just give it five minutes here and there. Work on it at halftime.”

“I'm watching baseball.”

“Work on it between innings. Or when somebody gets hit in the head with a wild pitch.”

“Whatever good I can do will be done by tomorrow,” Eddie says. “But I can't promise you much.”

“That's okay,” I say, untangling Lucy from the mower and pulling him toward the screen door. “I haven't had much luck with men who make promises.”

“Maybe you've been messing with the wrong kind of men.”

“Now that, my friend,” I say, pushing on the screen door, “is a distinct possibility.”

If there's
any place on earth any cuter than Fairhope, Alabama, I've never run into it.

The town is built up high on a bluff above the Gulf of Mexico and somehow—God knows how, it being at least fifty miles from nowhere—Fairhope seems to have fashioned itself as a bit of an artist colony. Or a mecca for rich retirees. I figure all this by the fact that the place is bustling, even on a Sunday morning. I have to circle the periphery of town twice before I find a reasonably deserted place to park. Then I work my way toward the main drag, which is lined with little storefronts that all have their doors open and music coming out, shops selling pottery or gelato or clothes made from hemp and other pricey, trendy things.

Lucy and I walk the length of Main Street, past the carefully restored houses with their broad porches and sky blue shutters. The trees are draped with Spanish moss, which I love, at least in daylight before it turns spooky, and three different houses have placed those little lending libraries full of free books out near the sidewalk. Mostly cookbooks, I note, when I stop to check one out, but I take a beat-up old copy of
Alice in Wonderland
for sentimentality's sake, since my mama used to read it to me as a child. And then church bells ring, reverberating through the cobblestone streets, and I find myself suddenly, briefly, momentarily—but sincerely—wishing I were the kind of girl who went to church.

I don't see Joe's Vintage and Salvage, which isn't surprising. It's probably the kind of establishment that can't afford to sit elbow to elbow with boutiques and wine bars. And I sure as hell don't see Doozy's Barbecue, which is probably located somewhere else as well. Somewhere like 1978. Eddie told me that the Bay Restaurant was on the bay, and it seems this street is heading just there. It's a steady, gentle slope downhill through the town, then you walk through a little park with benches and fountains, followed by a series of stone steps angling back and forth on themselves. I try not to let Lucy—who has gone apeshit with his first whiff of the water—make me stumble. By the second landing the trees part and I have a clear view of the gulf. The water sparkles, the midday sun bouncing off it like light off a mirror.

I'd noticed several rooms to rent as I walked, mostly homes with carriage houses out back, freestanding buildings they've rehabbed into rental suites. But since it's a holiday weekend, odds are they're all taken and, besides, any part of town this precious is undoubtedly out of my budget. Part of the problem is constantly feeling like I have to hide the car, or at least not go asking for trouble by driving it down the middle of Main Street. It seems like I keep abandoning it on scrubby little side streets, and then I'm constantly nervous. It would be an easy car to break into, the doors so big and loose that they almost invite you to run a coat hanger down the window or slip a jimmy through the cracks. So in the last two days I've gotten in the habit of taking everything of value out of the car every time I stop. Eddie's in possession of the tape now, but I have my guitar on my back, the strap knotted as best I can, and the remaining $268 is crammed in my bra, making me look misshapen. It felt
like a fortune in Macon, but $268 would be gone in a poof if I decided to rent one of those little carriage house rooms and treat myself to dinner at one of the tapas restaurants I passed.

The steps leading to the beach are rhythmic. Ten, then you zig and walk down ten more. Over and over, I descend and turn, until I lose count how many times I've done it. Coming back up is going to be God's own bitch, but at least now, thanks to Eddie, I know why Mama came to Fairhope. She must have been bringing the other backup singer, Marilee Jones, home. There had been two girls leaving Memphis in the Blackhawk, and given the undeniable charm of the town, I'm betting that Fairhope is also where Mama stayed that extra night before moving on. I pause, panting, pulling Lucy up on the leash, and consider the view. So much of what I've learned in the last ­forty-eight hours has been bewildering, hard to integrate with the woman I thought was my mother. But it does make sense she would linger here. Fairhope is just her kind of place. I guess they didn't have the gelato and the free libraries then, but they had the Spanish moss and this flat blue water and it feels like home, only slightly better, and isn't that what we're all looking for—a slightly better version of home? I can see why if a girl was tired and scared and barely pregnant, that Fairhope would seem like the perfect place to start over.

I also think I can see the restaurant, halfway up the beach, perched up on stilts at the end of the pier. I pause at one of those periscopes they put in vacation places and fish a couple of quarters out of my backpack, simultaneously trying to contain Lucy, who's showing way more enthusiasm for the smell of the bay than you'd think a landlocked Macon coonhound could muster.

But the periscope works and after I swipe it wildly left and right a couple of times, nearly blinding myself with the glitter of the day, I finally figure out how to focus. It gives me a good look at the restaurant. Sea-green shingles and a low-sloped roof with a deck on all four sides and a choir of beat-up Adirondack-style chairs, clustered in groups, so that the patrons can take in the view from every direction. Lots of southern restaurants are designed to look like shacks. On my walk through town, I passed a self-proclaimed supper club with the whole patio enclosed with abandoned screen doors, which had been further embellished with cleverly coaxed patterns of rust. I've sung in plenty of places like that through the years, and I guess it's cute, if that's how you want to think of the South. God knows the tourists love it. But the Bay Restaurant—which it seems this place must be, even though there's no sign of a sign—isn't like that. It isn't faux old or faux poor or faux rotted. It's just old and poor and rotted.

We go down the last four flights of steps and walk across the beach, then pick our way to the pier. About every other board has been patched and replaced and I try to step on the fresh planks, more out of superstition than anything else. When I get to the restaurant, it takes me a minute to find the door. It truly is a perfect square, set within the perfect square of the deck, and I have to almost circle the building, going the wrong way and turning three corners before I find how you get in. I knock and wait. If the church bells were any indication, it must be around eleven fifteen. Odds are they aren't open yet. I shield my eyes and look out at the water, wishing I'd brought my sunglasses. The day is so bright that I'm already working on half a headache.

I knock again and step back. I've come too early. I may as
well sit down in one of the Adirondack chairs or take a walk on the beach, or go back to town. Maybe try and find a brunch place with outside seating and an omelet for less than sixteen dollars and just as I'm thinking this, the door is wrenched open.

I can only conclude that the woman on the other side is Marilee Jones. She's tall. She must have been swiveled down in some sort of Playboy Bunny dip in that old photograph with Mama. In the picture, she didn't look much more than three inches taller than my mama and me, maybe five five at the most, but now . . . somehow through the years she learned how to stand up straight and claim her full spine, because the woman before me is easily six feet. She has the rangy, self-­possessed, quasi-lesbian look of a former athlete and she's barefoot, wearing a wash-worn dashiki and a pair of khaki pants. Her hair is cut short, so short she looks like a shorn sheep, and even though she's tossed the afro and the makeup and the turquoise jumpsuit, it's not hard to picture her onstage. This is somebody people would pay to look at.