Last Ride to Graceland (19 page)

“Lord, girl,” Dirk says, his eyes growing wide as he wipes his mouth. “Are you sure? Why would your pretty mama ever have taken up with a mess like David Beth? You ought to hear him on the radio. He starts out talking about Jesus and pretty soon he's talking about Buddha and Oprah and hell, sometimes he says something about the Arabs too, and the Japanese, like they're all sitting up in heaven in one big room. And he looks a fool on those billboards.”

“He probably is a fool. Most people are. But that doesn't mean he's not my daddy.”

Dirk picks up the phone again, squints at the screen. “Express Paternity claims it can run the test off of blood, feces, saliva, bones, hair, chewing gum, or semen.”

“Chewing gum or semen? Seems like we got a lot of options.”

He waves for the check. “Save your money, darlin'. Lunch is on me.”

HONEY

August 16, 1977

A
re you sick yet?”

“You make it sound it's a sure thing that I'm gonna be sick.”

Marilee taps her hands lightly against the steering wheel. “They say it's a good sign if you are. Means the baby's taken root. That it's going to stick around.”

“I'm not sure I want it to stick around.”

“Oh yeah. Yeah, you do.”

I don't know exactly how we got from Memphis to Tupelo. We didn't open a map or consult each other on the direction. It's like the car came here of its own accord, nothing more than a horse headed back to a barn. The sun, which was just peeking at us in Memphis, is fully up now.

“So what are we going to do with him?”

“I don't know.”

“Don't ask me to take that skinny, Buddha-quoting white boy to Fairhope.”

“Well I sure as shooting can't take him to Beaufort.”

Marilee glances in the rearview mirror, then bites at her lower lip like she's starting to say something. Probably about how if the man passed out in the backseat of this car really is the father of my child, that's all the more reason I should drive him back to Beaufort. Rehabilitate him and then marry him or perhaps, given the circumstances, marry him and then rehabilitate him. The sequence of things hardly matters when you're in a mess as bad as this.

“All right, then,” Marilee says. “If you don't want him and I don't want him, it looks like we need to find a hotel. See if you can lay your hands on some cash.”

It's a good idea. Elvis was a renowned stasher of money, always leaving twenties tucked here and there, under every ashtray, crammed low in every pocket. It was like on some level he always knew this day was coming, only he thought it might be him who'd have to leave Memphis in a rush, taking just the clothes on his back and the gas in his tank. So while Marilee adjusts the visor against the morning sun and continues to drive steadily east, I began to riffle through the car, running my hands under the seat cushions and flipping open every little gold cubbyhole on the dash or the doors. I come up with eighty-four dollars, a middling amount, neither here nor there. My purse is back in Graceland, not that it would have provided much in the way of riches even if I'd thought to grab it, and I bet Marilee's is too. We don't even have our driver's licenses.

“Are you absolutely sure you don't want to carry that boy to South Carolina?” Marilee asks again. She can't quite seem to let go of the idea.

“Are you kidding? My daddy's a preacher. He'd take one
look at David and spit in the dirt. And my mama wanted me to marry my high school sweetheart. Told me to my face I'd never do better than Bradley Ainsworth.”

There's a long pause while Marilee contemplates all this. Finally she asks, “Was she insulting you or complimenting him?”

I've never thought of it that way. “It felt like she was casting stones at me, but maybe you're right. Maybe it was just her way of building up Bradley. You know, saying I could search the earth and not find a bigger heart . . .”

“So he's got a big heart, this old boyfriend?”

“The biggest.”

“And he still loves you?”

“Probably. His letters say—”

“Letters? He's still bothering to write you letters after all this time?”

I nod, rubbing my temples.

“Then there's your plan,” Marilee says, in no particular tone of voice. That's one of her strengths, the way she can say something absolutely matter-of-fact, like a TV reporter, without giving you a single clue how she feels about it one way or another.

“I don't have a plan.”

“Sure you do. Maybe not in the front of your head, maybe just in the back. But some part of you knows that if you can just get yourself back to Beaufort, your good old reliable high school sweetheart will make a fine daddy for your baby girl. Better than this load of trash we're hauling in the backseat, that's for sure.”

It's a rush of words. A long speech for Marilee, who's never been much of a talker. And she's probably right, at least about Bradley making a better daddy than either David or Philip ever
would, and maybe she's even right about how the back of my mind has been churning since the first day my period was late. I knew I was pregnant almost from the start. I've always been one of those girls who goes twenty-eight days without variation, just like the textbook. You could plant the crops by me.

For some reason I can only think of one thing to say in response. “This baby I'm carrying might be a boy.”

“Nah,” she says, and she laughs. “Somewhere deep in your heart, you know dang well it's a girl. You even put it in the song.”

“I wrote those lyrics before I knew I was pregnant,” I say, and I peel a twenty off the fold of bills, kind of quick and subtle, and slip it into my bra. I don't think Marilee sees me.

“Besides,” I rush on, since I'm nervous about stealing the money from the fold and thus from Marilee, even though we both know I have a lot farther to go and she'd probably understand, “I've got to find this baby a daddy, and it's easier to find a daddy for a boy.”

I say all this like it's fact, but the joke of the situation, if there is a joke in the situation, is that I don't particularly like boys. Never have. If I could choose, I'd rather have the baby girl Marilee predicted, but I've got to be practical, and there's no denying that the world greets boys with way more enthusiasm than it greets girls. It's okay for a man to show up unannounced and unexpected, to just walk into the room carrying nothing but himself. Everybody smiles and waves, because you can never have enough men in the world. But women? The universe is already drunk with girls. Nobody needs any more of us, and this bud of a baby inside of me is starting life with enough disadvantages. God will at least let it be a boy.

“Now why do you go and say a thing like that?” Marilee asks. “Because you think a man can't hold a daughter just as close as a son? Lord. You lived better than a year at Graceland and you still think that?”

“No, I guess you're right. He loved that little girl. There were times when I thought his little girl was the only thing on earth he could still love.” We're coming up on an exit with a sign saying they have a Holiday Inn, but for some reason Marilee blows right past it. If anything, she speeds up. So I ask the question I most dread asking. “Will she be okay?”

Marilee hesitates, just long enough that I know she's remembering the exact same image I am. A nine-year-old, her hair drooping down in a messy ponytail, walking around Graceland in the middle of the night saying, “My daddy's dead, my daddy's dead.” Saying it over and over until somebody finally had the presence of mind to take her downstairs and make her a milkshake.

“Not for a while,” Marilee finally says, pulling the visor even lower. Because the sun is relentless and brutal, and it seems like maybe we're driving straight into the hottest day God ever made. “But eventually, yes. Yes she will.”

From the back, David stirs, makes a sound more animal than human.

“So we'll take the next exit,” Marilee says. “The first one that has anything.”

I look in the backseat and nod. We don't have a choice.

Within a
mile we see a sign for a Rest-A-While Inn and pull off. It may have had a sign on the interstate, but as it turns out, the
hotel isn't particularly close to the interstate. We drive three or four miles through pure country until we come up on it, perched in the middle of a cracked parking lot. I would say this is the ragged side of Tupelo, but for all I know, every side of Tupelo is the ragged side.

Marilee pulls in and looks at me. I still have sixty-four dollars in the palm of my hand.

“You better get the room,” she says.

“Why me?”

“You think we all need to parade in there? A black woman and a white woman and a half-dead, foaming-at-the-mouth white man, and we all three of us pull up in a fifty-­thousand-dollar car at a no-tell motel at seven in the morning with a couple of wadded-up twenties in our hands, and tell them we're looking to take a room? You think that's not going to get the desk clerk calling the cops?”

She's got a point. After his brief spasm of consciousness, that singular growl, David has turned to his other side and appears to be sliding back into hibernation. So I get out, cash in hand and praying they don't ask for any kind of identification, and walk up to the scarred wooden door.

Welcome, it says, and a bell chimes as I walk into an empty room. Every surface is dotted with African violets. They're the last things I expected to see. They remind me of my mother and I think, once again, how disappointed she is going to be in me if I ever make it back to Beaufort. Her daughter who took off claiming she was going to be a star and who is now coming back nothing more than pregnant and broke.

There's a TV behind the counter, black-and-white and
turned to a Memphis station.
TRAGEDY AT GRACELAND
says the banner underneath the picture.

I raise my palm and start to ding the little dinger to try to pull somebody up from the vinyl curtain, and that's when I see her. She's huddled in a folding lawn chair behind the desk, staring at the TV screen with such intensity that she hasn't even noticed my presence. When I say, “Excuse me,” she jumps.

Her hands are full of toilet paper and there's a roll beside her on the floor. She's been crying. Crying for hours, no doubt, all alone in that folding lawn chair, unable to look away from the TV. She stares at me as if she's having trouble focusing, as if she's a person emerging from a movie theater in broad daylight or just waking up from a dream.

“Did you hear?” she says. She wipes tears and snot and hair from her face with a long, limp strand of the toilet paper.

“Hear what?” I say weakly. Of course we knew that the news about Elvis would get out, but I don't think that until that very moment it had occurred to me that the news about Elvis would be the only news on TV. That the whole world would come still, just for a moment. Would pause on its axis and debate turning back the other way.

She shuffles out from behind the counter. She is a heavy woman, her feet shoved deep in her slippers and turning out to each side, like a ballerina's or a penguin's. Middle-aged, plain, and life has beaten her down in a hundred more ways than I could even begin to list. I've seen this woman, or plenty just like her, at every stop we made on every tour. This woman is willing to pay two weeks of hard-earned wages just to sit a few rows closer, just to have a chance of catching his scarf. Marilee and
the others and I would stand back, in our safe place at the rear of the stage, and smirk at these women. Somebody was going to have a heart attack one night, that's what we always said. Go belly up halfway through the concert, die of pure bliss at the foot of the stage with Elvis's silk scarf in her hand.

Only now this particular woman is standing in front of me and she doesn't seem ridiculous at all.

She extends her pudgy arms toward me in a hug. “What are we going to do?” she asks, her voice a whisper. “What are we going to do without him?” Through the big glass window over her shoulder, I can see Marilee struggling to get David out of the backseat. He is sagging, going limp in her arms like a war protestor, and she looks toward the door in desperation, wondering what's taking me so long.

“I don't know,” I whisper back to the woman. “I don't think any of us are ever going to be right again.”

CORY

T
he receptionist is not pleased to see me. Even in my funeral dress and wearing the lipstick I fished out of my backpack, she still finds me unfit to stand within the walls of the Pinnacle Church. The lobby is understated, tasteful. It feels more like a hotel. All around us slender, blond women are walking back and forth in their little high heels. Their hair has been professionally blown out and their jackets are bright jewel colors.

“Do you have an appointment?” the receptionist asks, even though we both know I don't. From the skeptical look on her face, I can tell that she's afraid I'm a journalist. Journalists, I gathered in my quick flurry of research on Dirk's iPhone, have not been friends of the Pinnacle Church.

“Not exactly,” I say. “But I think Mr. Beth might want to see me.”

“Pastor.”

“Pastor Beth. Could you just tell him that Honey Berry's daughter is here?”

She frowns. Mama's cartoon of a name has put her off, and the whole thing might've ended before it began if Dirk hadn't stepped forward at precisely that minute, coming up to the desk to stand beside me. He had insisted on escorting me in, even though we can't leave Lucy alone in the car for long. When we passed a bank on the way in, it showed ninety-two degrees, and yet Dirk had seemed to sense, better than I had, that I might need a man in uniform to give me an air of legitimacy.

The only trouble is, as he stepped forward, so did the bouncer for Pinnacle Church. They look almost identical, their khaki shirts straining across their stomachs, their expressions sour, and I have no idea who trumps whom in this situation—whether a Graceland security guard outranks a Pinnacle Church security guard, or what Dirk plans to do if they turn us away. For somebody who was sent here to apprehend me, he has turned from enemy to ally pretty fast.

“I believe the pastor was a friend of my mother's,” I say again to the woman behind the desk. Like mine, her eyes are flicking back and forth between Dirk and her own hired muscle and, also like me, she seems to have no desire to find out what'll happen if these two start wailing on each other. “Tell him my name is Cory Beth Ainsworth and my mama was Honey Berry.”

“Sit down,” she says. “Someone will be right with you.”

I nod at Dirk, who nods at the other cop, who nods at the receptionist, who nods at me. Dirk heads back out to Lucy and I move over to a group of chairs. Nice chairs. Solid, covered in a pastel plaid, and the flowers on the table before me are real, not silk or plastic. The rug beneath my feet is soft and deep and there's a sort of water fountain babbling away in the corner.
They do things right at Pinnacle, at least if the lobby is any indication. But there's also a portrait of David Beth hanging just across from me and I study it, looking for my face in his. I don't see it, which isn't surprising. There's no room for David Beth in my features, or any other man either. Everyone in Beaufort always said that I looked like Mama had spit me out whole.

“Miss Ainsworth?”

The voice doesn't boom. It doesn't threaten or frighten. Whatever kind of preacher David Beth has become, it isn't that kind. His voice is civilized and low pitched. Persuasive. Maybe some diction coach taught him how to sound so pleasant when his radio show first caught on, or who knows, maybe he always had it. The pastor's bio on Dirk's iPhone said he “hailed from California,” and people from California often have this sort of nowhere-in-particular kind of voice.

He is standing before me, his arms spread. Evidently he thinks I'm going to stand up and hug him.

This is not how I thought this would happen. I suspected that I'd be granted entrance the minute I said my mama's open-sesame name, but I imagined being ushered in through some back door, with the whiff of shame trailing down the hall behind me. There'd be whispering. Shadows. For if the daughter of a dead lover shows up nearly forty years after the fact, she's generally come for only one reason. And not the sort a megachurch preacher would welcome.

But here David Beth is, standing before me, his arms open, beaming broadly like he's witnessing the second coming.

“I was grieved to hear of your mother's passing,” he says as I stand and give him one of those awkward side-to-side hugs. We
don't fit well. Our hipbones clank and I knock his chin with the top of my head.

“You know she's dead?” I whisper. I try to study him out of the corner of my eye, but the man in the flesh gives no more clues than the man in his portrait. Just as his voice is both friendly and formless, so is his face.

“I knew she was very ill,” he says. “When we talked, I had the sense it was close to the end.”

“Talked?”

“On the telephone. She called me . . . I guess it's been a year.”

“And were you surprised to hear from her? Surprised that she just popped back in from nowhere after all that time?”

He shifts his weight, turns more squarely toward me, although he doesn't step back like a normal person would. We are still standing unnaturally close and he knows how to make and hold eye contact, this man. He knows how to stand with his legs grounded beneath him and put a hand on each side of a person's shoulders and look them right in the face without flinching, and as he does all these things to me, a chill runs down my back. Radio is too small to hold David Beth, at least for long. He has charisma and he knows it. TV is next. Politics after that. There's something Bill Clinton–like about him. The brilliant good old boy. Sexy but sincere. This man could go far.

“Honey said she had some loose ends to tie up,” David says. “Some forgiveness that she both sought and sought to grant.” He smiles suddenly, the professional solemnity giving away to an even more carefully rehearsed joy. “And she predicted that you might be coming.”

“Did you know I existed? Not just when Mama called you from her deathbed but way back when, before I was born? Did she tell you she was pregnant?”

“Yes. She informed me of such on the day that we left Graceland.”

She informed him of such. That's a damn cold way of putting it.

But yet at the same time I have to admire the guy's style, for during this whole strange little conversation, I haven't once dropped my voice. I'm not shouting, but I'm not whispering either, and this lobby is asses-to-elbows full of people. The security guard and some sort of camera crew, setting up for God knows what, and all those thin blond women going clickety-­clack back and forth across the marble floor. But he does not flinch or try to shush me. He does not even step away. When one of us finally breaks this strange dance, it's me.

“Let us talk in private,” he says, and it seems as if he is offering the privacy for my sake, not his. I'm shaking but he has an eerie sort of calm, and I remember that the Wikipedia article on Dirk's phone said that Pinnacle is a church not only without denomination, but without any clear political affiliation as well. He is neither red nor blue, this man who stands before me. Neither old school or new age. He quotes Jesus and Buddha and Gandhi and Oprah and he is Jewish by birth and yet he somehow gets away with it all, even here in the middle of the Bible Belt.

“So she predicted I might be coming?”

“Mothers know their daughters, I suppose,” he says, and then he smiles, showing off the best that Mississippi cosmetic
dentistry has to offer. “But, as I said, if you'd like to follow me, we can continue this conversation in my office.”

“Thank you, Mr. Beth,” I say. I say it weakly, aware I'm already halfway down some sort of slippery slope, the same one my mother slid down so long ago. For even in the middle of everything I've heard about him, even in the middle of his own confession that he knew Honey was pregnant and let her go anyway, even though that means he knew I existed and has done butt-nothing about it for thirty-seven years . . . there's something charming in this man. Something that makes me want to put my head on his shoulder here and now, even though I know I wouldn't be the first woman he's talked right out of her truth, and the odds are I won't be the last. “Or should I call you David?”

“You can call me Pastor,” he says. “Everyone does.”

“They left
me lying there in the hotel bed,” he says. We are sitting on a couch now, on opposite ends and facing each other. Even though his private office has a large and intimidating desk, he chooses to position himself beside me rather than stepping behind it. It's part of his game, I suppose. A way of saying
I own everything within sight and I could intimidate you, if I wanted to. But I don't want to. Instead, I will sit beside you on this couch, both of us turned with our legs half drawn beneath us.
Equals. Friends.

He chuckles. “They left me unconscious and fully dressed, right down to my shoes, although somebody had the mercy to leave a cup of water and an open Bible on the nightstand. It was probably the work of your mother. I was strung out. We all were.”

“Because Elvis died.”

He places his index fingers together and brings them to his
chin. Like this is some game of charades and he's trying to make me say
philosopher
. Come to think of it, he'd struck pretty much the same pose in the portrait in the lobby. “I think anyone who'd spent much time with the man knew his days were numbered. We'd all seen him in bad shape, not just once, but a hundred times. But we had also seen him come roaring back a hundred times. It's an odd thing, isn't it? How you can know on one level that a tragedy is inevitable and yet still be surprised when it finally happens?”

I nod, and he goes sailing on.

“Some people say it was the drugs that killed him,” David continues. “And some people deny they had anything to do with his death. But I was there, Miss Ainsworth, and believe me when I say that there's no doubt. Elvis died of an overdose.”

I start to speak, but once again it would seem my contributions aren't necessary to keep the conversation going. This man asks questions, but he doesn't expect anyone else to answer, or venture an opinion of their own. It's a preacher trait. My grandfather had it too. Maybe that's why Honey fell for him so hard. No girl can resist a man who reminds her of her daddy.

“He mixed up quite a cocktail on the last night,” David says. “A combination of uppers and downers, a heaping handful of pills. I remember looking down in the palm of his hand and thinking they looked like candy. Like M&M's, and we washed them down with Jack Daniel's, Elvis and I.”

“So you were with him,” I finally manage to wedge in. “Right before he died?”

“Perhaps I was the last person who saw Elvis alive,” David says. “Except for Ginger, the particular young lady he was with
at the time. From what I understand from the newspaper accounts, he woke her up when he got out of bed to go to the bathroom and she asked if he was okay. Something trifling like that. But I was the last person who really talked to him, who had a genuine conversation.”

“You know that for sure?”

He smiles. “Who can say anything for sure? But I like to think so. The important thing is that Elvis was in a serious mood that night. He wanted to discuss philosophy. The nature of the divine, to be precise. He believed each human soul was put on the earth for a very specific purpose; that we all had been entrusted with a holy task that we were to carry out during our lifetimes. And that is what we discussed, until the wee hours of the morning. We had that sort of relationship, Elvis and I.”

He's a self-satisfied bastard, I'll give him that, but I'm trying to get the sequence straight in my head. “So Elvis went to the dentist with Mama and Marilee, and when he got back to Graceland the two of you washed a handful of drugs down with Jim Beam and you talked about God. Then he went to bed with Ginger, and at some point early in the morning he got up and went to the bathroom and he died.”

He nods. “It was Jack Daniel's we drank instead of Jim Beam, but otherwise, yes, that's exactly what happened.”

“If you knew it was such a dangerous dose, why did you take it?”

He presses his fingertips together again and I find myself staring at them. Odd fingers. The second one is longer than the third. “I have spent a lifetime, Miss Ainsworth, asking myself precisely that question. It was such a large handful of pills and I
gobbled them so willingly, not even asking what they were. I was a young man, twenty-seven, with everything in the world to live for. I certainly wasn't inviting death, not even on a subconscious level. And yet I took this ridiculous dose, passed from his palm to mine like a communion wafer, followed with a swig of dark brown southern poison, which I once again quite willingly swilled, straight from the bottle. Despite a lifetime of contemplation I've never been able to understand exactly why. Perhaps it's as simple as the fact we were all trained to do whatever Elvis did. I suspect your mother told you that much, that his every whim fell upon us like an edict from on high. Or perhaps on some level I knew a deeper calling was awaiting me somewhere.”

He shrugs. “I only know,” he says, “that Elvis and I took the pills, drank the bourbon, and spent the next few hours talking of God.”

I sort of believe him. It's odd, but no odder than any of the other stories about what happened at Graceland on that final night. I know that the book Elvis was reading when he died, the book he took with him to the toilet where he would spend his last earthly minutes, was titled
The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus.

“It seems significant that you did exactly the same batch of drugs as Elvis,” I say. “And yet he died and you lived.”

“Yes,” David says with sudden enthusiasm, and his hands fly out in an elegant gesture. Someone has coached him for television. Or maybe it's the old karate teacher in him. He knows how to make every move count. “Of the two of us, I was the one who was spared, and that is precisely the fulcrum on which it all tilts. I have told this story to so many people through the
years, Miss Ainsworth, but somehow they have almost all managed to miss this key idea. You are very much like your mother. I saw her in your face, of course, the minute we met, but now I see her in your mind. For when I woke up in that dreadful little hotel where Honey and Marilee left me, this was the first thought that seized me. That Elvis and I had partaken of the same communion, that we had been led to exactly the same abyss, and yet he tumbled into it but I did not. Why do you guess that might be?”