Last Ride to Graceland (20 page)

It's startling to have this man who both asks and answers his own questions suddenly show so much interest in my opinion. I'm startled right into silence for a second and my first impulse is to point out the obvious: that Elvis was already aging and sick, already on the lip of that abyss, and so of course he'd fallen, while the younger, stronger David had managed to hang on. That's an honest answer and probably the closest we have to the right one. But something tells me that I'll get farther down the road with flattery—flattery of the most outrageous cosmic kind. So I say, “Because Elvis was right in saying that each man was put on earth for a reason, chosen for a specific purpose? God needed you to remain on earth for some special work?”

“Precisely,” says David, dropping his hands and leaning back into the cushions. “That is the first thought that occurred to me when my eyes fluttered open in that awful little hotel. That Elvis was dead and I was alive, and you know what they say?”

“The King is dead. Long live the King.”

“Precisely,” he says again. He thinks I'm stupid. He likes me. He likes stupid people better than any other kind. He's nothing but a puffed-up fraud and yet I know he's also telling me the
truth. Or at least more of the truth than anyone else has ever managed to tell me, both since I've left Beaufort and before.

“It must have been a burden,” I say. “To have been the one who lived when the other one died.”

“You are so very perceptive,” he says with a shake of his head. This is a strange chess match, me sitting here on a couch across from this man who might be my father, each of us trying to out-flatter and out-bullshit the other. “For ‘burden' is just the right word, and that's why I went on a bender, I'm afraid. When I woke up and everyone around me was running back and forth, screaming that Elvis had died in the night, the first thing I did was not rush to his aid but take even more pills. I wanted to go back to sleep. Perhaps a part of me truly did want to die. But your mother and Marilee picked me up and they threw me in the back of the car and I suppose I shall forever owe them for that decision. They could have left me there for the police to find. They could have left it all to come down upon my head, for Elvis was hardly dead an hour before the witch hunt started brewing. The press . . .”

He gives a delicate little shudder. “Everyone was looking for someone to blame and it could so easily have been me. I might have had to face the world known only as the man who had given a fatal dose of drugs to Elvis Presley. Can you imagine what my life would have been like then?”

He doesn't expect an answer, so I don't bother giving him one. Instead, I look around the room. It's well done, just like the lobby. At the back of the office there are two open doors. Through one I can see a bedroom, and through the other one a bath. He spends most nights here. He lives where he works. He
is a man who, as they say, is “married to his calling.”

“And so I woke up in a Rest-A-While Inn on the outskirts of Tupelo,” he continues when it's obvious I have nothing to say. “I'd pissed myself more than once and it dried on my pants. I'd thrown up and it had dried on my shirt. The TV was turned to sports but I reached for the remote and started turning the channels.” He smiles, and for a moment looks young and impish, like the boy my mama must have loved. “But wouldn't you know it? Elvis was dead on every damn one of them. And then I found the news channel and saw the date and realized I'd been asleep for three days. Three solid days. It didn't seem possible. But my mouth was dry as a desert, so I drank the water your mother had most kindly left me and then I got up and stumbled to the bathroom and tried to clean myself as best as I could. It was useless. And then I sat there on the edge of the bed with the remote in my hand and I started surfing the channels to see what the world knew.

“The tabloids were closer to the truth than anybody. Even now when I'm walking through a Walmart and I see a
Star
magazine or a
National Enquirer
saying that aliens invaded North Dakota I stop and think, ‘Who knows, perhaps they're right.' Because the honorable news sources were falling all over themselves to say that drugs were not a factor in Elvis's death, and those cheap pickup newspapers were speculating on exactly what drugs he'd used. One or two of them came quite close to getting it right.” He ducks his chin and smiles at me again. “You're not going to believe what I'm going to tell you next.”

“Don't be so sure. I'm a very gullible girl. Try me.”

He laughs, throwing his head back. “I detect a willing spirit
in you, underneath all that smart talk and cynicism, so I'll risk the truth. Honesty is such a slippery thing, is it not?”

“Sometimes it's easier to tell the truth to strangers than to the people we know.”

“Indeed it is. But I have the funny feeling I do know you, even though we've just met.”

Because I'm your daughter, you asshole,
I think, but I say, “Perhaps we met in a previous lifetime.”

He nods. “Perhaps so, but to return to the story at hand, let me say that the more I regained consciousness on that strange, long-ago day, the more I sensed that the spirit of Elvis had come inside of me sometime during that lost time in which I had slept.” He puts a hand on his heart. “I felt him. I knew that I had his strength and mine too, and I came through the grace of God to understand that when there are two spirits and one departs, that the person who is left behind has somehow double the power, as if both souls exist inside one body . . .”

“Like when Elvis lived and his twin brother died.”

This flummoxes him. But only for a moment. “Who can say? Perhaps Jesse's sacrifice was what made Elvis Elvis, perhaps their two spirits merged and became stronger than either one of them could have managed on his own. Let me tell you what life has taught me, Miss Ainsworth: People don't become special just by accident. It isn't some throw of the genetic dice. They are special for a reason. And if his brother's death was what gave Elvis his extraordinary talent and charisma, can't you see how the power would be even stronger within me? Because I hadn't just incorporated the soul of a newborn baby, I'd taken on the gifts of Elvis Presley himself. Do you understand what I
am telling you?”

“That there are aliens in North Dakota?”

I wait for him to get angry, but he doesn't. He just smiles at me, and the smile is a little sad. Someone else has recently looked at me just like that, but in the moment I can't remember who. I'm just thinking that this man before me went on a three-day bender in a Rest-A-While Inn and somehow concluded that it was the equivalent of Christ rising from the tomb.

“I hurt for you,” he says. “Because you are one of those who must see to believe.”

“Actually, I'm one of those who has trouble believing even after I've seen.”

“But you do understand what I'm saying to you.”

“Yeah. You're telling me you think you're as big as Elvis.”

“Oh, my dear child,” he says. “I am much bigger than Elvis.”

I ask
him if I can freshen up, that stupid phrase. As I expected, he points me toward his private bathroom and I go inside, shut the door, and stand for a minute in the darkness, trying to pull myself together. When I finally flip on the light I see the bathroom is huge. Nearly as big as my trailer, bigger than the shotgun house from this morning, with mirrors on every wall. It has one of those showers that takes up half the room and has multiple showerheads and a bench where you can sit and steam yourself. I start there.

There's a disposable razor resting among the bottles of Aveda bath products, and this is surprising on two levels. First of all, Pastor Beth seems like the sort of guy who'd order one of
those fancy vintage razors online, not pick up a pack of disposables in Walgreens, and second, most men don't shave in the shower. I stand flat-footed on the marble, the thin plastic razor in my hand. Is there a woman somewhere who also uses this bathroom? Maybe even another man? I can't see the man known as Pastor bringing some paramour here, but then again, stranger things have happened and nobody batted an eye when he escorted me into his private rooms and then closed the door, even calling out that we were not to be disturbed. There's a snip of hair between the blades, thick and black, much like the hair on David Beth's head, so maybe he shaves his back or his chest or something. Hell, I don't know.

I only know I have exhibit A. I step from the shower and begin to run water in the sink to muffle the sounds. I pull open all the drawers until I find the rest of the pack of disposable razors, then pull out one and replace it in the shower. There's an extra toothbrush too, still resting in its box, and I break it out and swap it for the one resting in a cup beside the sink. The new toothbrush is a different color, which is unfortunate, and I have no idea if David Beth is the kind of man who notices these things. But I've come too far to back out now, so I cut off the running water and check the trash can for discarded Kleenex or dental floss.

All I come up with is a Q-tip. But I have the toothbrush and the razor too, and I wrap all three in toilet paper and zip them into the side pocket of my backpack, then step back into the pastor's study.

He's seated behind the desk now. It's a signal. We are moving from the friendly, conversational, shooting-the-breeze part
of this interview to the serious part. The money part.

He waves for me to sit across from him.

“How did you find me?” he asks.

“You don't exactly keep a low profile. I counted eleven billboards with your face on them in a ten-mile stretch.”

“Of course,” he says. “I misstated my question. I shouldn't have asked how you found me, I should have asked how you knew I was the one you should be looking for.”

“Marilee Jones gave me your name. I spent the last two days with her in Fairhope.”

“Marilee. I should have known. How is she?”

“Strong and fine and reasonably happy. At least that's how she seemed to me.”

“Not surprising. A hurricane couldn't knock down Marilee.”

“I went through Macon too. Saw Philip Cory.”

“And should that name mean anything in particular?” His expression wavers for just a second before immediately returning to his megawatt smile. “Ah yes, I think I see. And that is so like your mother. She named you Cory Beth, the last names of the two men who might be responsible. Hedged her bets a bit. I hope you don't judge her for that, the fact she really couldn't say for sure. The times were so different then.”

“It's weird. Weird that you all stayed exactly where she left you and weird she was able to find you, after all this time. How do you think she did?”

He shrugs. “Facebook. What else? She said you were the one who set her up with an account.”

“I did. To help her pass the time in hospice.” I remember how she took to it, spending far more hours on that stupid lap
top than I ever would have guessed and how one day when I walked in, she'd looked up at me and said, “A computer is a time machine, isn't it?”

David is looking at me quizzically, his head dropped to one side. “The other man . . .”

“Philip Cory.”

“You say you stopped to see him too? What was he like?”

“He gave me four hundred dollars.”

“An odd amount.” He presses his hands together again in that childish pose. Here's the church and here's the steeple. “It seems too much to give a stranger and too little to give a daughter.”

“I thought so too.”

“But then again, you're a grown woman. How old are you, exactly?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Yes, of course. Do you have children of your own?”

I shake my head. “Not a husband or kids or even a real job. I'm a musician.”

He nods thoughtfully. “Of course, I don't have to tell you that since you're thirty-seven, there's no need for parental support. No need for college. But don't worry. I wouldn't leave you utterly high and dry. There are discretionary funds in the budget for things like this.”

Things like this? I'm a “thing like this”? Maybe Pastor Beth really is a miracle worker, because he's certainly done the impossible here. In the five minutes since I emerged from the bathroom, he's got me praying that I'm the daughter of a Georgia politician.

Now he's pulling a checkbook from a drawer, clicking a pen. I have a sudden vision that he's going to write me a check for $401. Just enough to beat Philip Cory, because he's the sort of man who has to beat everybody, and also because he likes the idea of an odd amount. Enough to guarantee I'll thank him and move on, but not enough to imply culpability.

“Don't you have the slightest curiosity?” I ask him, and I'm ashamed to say my voice breaks on the word
curiosity
, almost like I'm getting ready to cry. “Any curiosity at all as to whether or not it's true and I'm your daughter?”

“But of course you are my daughter. Anyone who comes through these doors seeking help is my son or daughter.”

“Give me a fucking break. You know I'm talking about being your blood daughter.” I look at him there, his pen hovering over the checkbook, frowning like he's try to do some sort of spiritual math, and I know a better woman would stand up and tell him where to stick that checkbook and flounce out the door. That's what my mama would've done. In fact, that's probably exactly what she did do, thirty-eight years ago. She just walked out on this guy empty-handed and without looking back, even though she was younger and more scared and in even worse shape than I am now.

“Mama told you she was pregnant that last night at Graceland, didn't she?” I say. “That's probably why you did those drugs with Elvis. You know you were responsible and you didn't want to face it. And when you woke up in that hotel room all those years ago, you knew good and well you had a child on the way. But you never called her once, in all those years. Never tried to find out if she'd had the baby and if it was healthy.
Whether I was a boy or a girl.”