Last Ride to Graceland (29 page)

“I told them to do whatever they thought was best. Although by the nature of the question, I'm thinking some of them must've helped you, and I'm glad of it.”

“Did you call Fred?”

“Who's Fred?”

“He works at Graceland.”

Bradley takes another slow sip of tea. “No, whatever you found at Graceland you found on your own.”

“Mama wrote a song,” I say. “And Elvis sang some of it. She had a tape of her voice and his. Did she ever tell you that?”

He shakes his head.

“The tape was in the car. I've just about finished the lyrics and the melody is already there. They want me to record it, let Sun Records release it and Graceland sell it. I don't know, because you never know, not really, but it could be the start of something big. It could change my life.”

“Well that sounds good.”

“It is good.”

He swallows. “So you're staying in Memphis?”

“For a while.”

The waitress is back with a plate of biscuits. She sets them down in the middle of the table, fat and brown and warm, I can tell from the steam, then she plunks a bowl of whipped butter and a squeeze bottle of honey beside the plate.

“We didn't ask for biscuits and honey,” Bradley says.

She shrugs. “They come whether you ask for them or not.”

I pick up a biscuit and pull it apart, then reach for the squeeze bottle.
In the end, people are whatever they choose to be.
Who said that? I've been talking to so many people about so many strange things during the last five days that I have to stop to remember. But it was David Beth who let fly with that particular nugget. He said it to me as he was sending me off with his guilty paternity check and a bag of his stolen DNA. It's a surprising little piece of philosophy coming from such a fool but, then again, I guess through the ages fools have always been a source of wisdom.

People are what they choose to be, and over and over again, Bradley Ainsworth has chosen to be my daddy.

“If you're staying in Memphis to be a big recording artist,” Bradley says cautiously, his mouth full of biscuit, “who's going to look after that dog?”

“I was hoping you'd take him,” I say, even though the idea had not occurred to me until just that very second. And it makes me ache to think of Lucy and Bradley driving home to Beaufort, happiness and sadness all squished together in the same breath. “Maybe you could watch him until I get back.”

He's still being careful. “You're coming back?”

“Of course I'm coming back. It's home, isn't it? Just promise me you won't let him ride in the flatbed. He's not the smartest dog in the world.”

“What you call him?”

“Lucy. It's a long story.”

“Lucy,” Bradley repeats, looking under the table at the dog, tossing him the last of a biscuit. “Good boy.”

“He's not that good either. He tried to bite a clerk at the La Quinta in Montgomery, Alabama.”

“Now, I have trouble believing that,” says Bradley, starting that crooning tone he gets with dogs and children. “Listen here, Lucy Boy. Are you and me going fishing out on the bay? We gonna catch us some crabs and fry them up in the pan?”

“These biscuits are good,” I say.

“Nothing beats honey on a warm biscuit.”

“Tupelo honey's not from Tupelo, did you know that?”

“It seems like it would be.”

“I know. But things are never exactly what they seem, are they?”

“Nope,” says Bradley, wiping the gold from his mouth. “They never are.”

AUTHOR
'
S NOTE

I got the idea for
Last Ride to Graceland
one Sunday morning, when I was lying in bed reading the newspaper. It seemed that after thirty-eight years, the estate of Elvis Presley had decided to restore the Stutz Blackhawk Elvis had driven on the last day of his life and add it to the fleet of cars on display at Graceland.

One detail from the article jumped out at me. The writer described how the car had been wrapped in plastic since Elvis died, and that finally opening it was like unearthing a time capsule. There was still trash on the floor and the faint smell of a man's cologne. That was just enough to get the writer part of my brain all shook up. Before the end of that rainy Sunday, I'd written out a full outline for the novel.

Last Ride to Graceland
is a work of fiction. For example, the famous Stutz Blackhawk wasn't found in a fishing shed in South Carolina, but rather has been stored at Graceland the entire time. Honey and Cory are entirely of my own imagination, as are the people they meet along the way in their separate fictional journeys to and from Memphis. The snippet of song fea
turing Elvis's voice and the eight-track in the car is another of my own inventions.

The last hours of Elvis's life have been exhaustively studied and documented and I did research them before writing, along with firsthand accounts of what life at Graceland was like during the waning days of the King's reign. Unfortunately, the sadder the detail, the more likely it is to be true: Elvis did have a twin brother who died at birth and many biographers speculate that he suffered a kind of “survivor's guilt” his whole life. He had a fascination with religion and spirituality of all kinds and was a deeply superstitious man who did in fact die shortly after the anniversary of his mother's death, with both of them passing at the age of forty-two. His last words were spoken to his girlfriend, Ginger Alden, who found his body in the bathroom hours later. Most painful of all, his father, Vernon, and daughter, Lisa Marie, were at Graceland that night and witnessed the panic and confusion.

But with the exception of Elvis, Priscilla, Lisa Marie, Vernon, and Ginger—who are real but I've used here fictitiously—the characters are entirely of my own imagination.

I drove the route from Beaufort, South Carolina, to Memphis, Tennessee—in the summer, no less, and accompanied not by a coonhound named Lucy but rather by a terrier named Thad. We stopped in Macon, Fairhope, and Tupelo before arriving in Memphis and touring Graceland. When I told a security guard I was a writer, he let me step behind the ropes and approach the Stutz Blackhawk they have on display there. (Not the one Elvis drove the day he died, but an earlier model which was very similar in design, if not quite as storied.) I must con
fess it took my breath away. When I asked if I might maybe dare sit in it—purely for the sake of research, of course—the young man regretfully shook his head.

“Ma'am,” he said, “nobody touches this car but the spirit of Elvis.”

So there you have it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Books are rarely born in a vacuum. I got the idea for
Last Ride to Graceland
on a rainy Sunday morning when I was looking at my local paper,
The Charlotte Observer,
and saw an article about how they were hauling the Stutz Blackhawk Elvis Presley drove on the last day of his life from Memphis to the NASCAR museum in Charlotte. Once it was spiffed up, it would be added to the collection of Elvis cars at Graceland. One line in the article leapt out at me. The car had been sealed so tightly for so many years that one of the restoration experts described it as “like opening a time capsule”

For a Southern girl obsessed with the past, that line was like waving a red flag at a bull.

The idea for this book completely came to me that day. Honey and Cory Beth started talking immediately, as I lay in bed scribbling on a yellow legal pad, with the newspaper open beside me. While I have relied on real facts about Elvis and his family for the background of the book, all the other characters are utterly fictional. And the Blackhawk wasn't found in a fishing shed on Polawana Island in Beaufort (where I own a spit of land), but had rather been in Graceland since 1977, holding its secrets there.

In order to give the road trip a breath of authenticity, I drove the route from Beaufort to Memphis in the dead middle of summer, making stops in Macon, Fairhope, and Tupelo along the way. I wasn't in a big black muscle car with a half-witted coonhound. I was in a Prius with a half-witted terrier. But I did stay in many pet-friendly La Quintas and I did have an Elvis Presley milkshake. I cannot recommend either highly enough.

And books are also never published in a vacuum so I'd like to thank the wonderful people at Gallery Books: my unflappably calm editor, Karen Kosztolnyik, and her infallible assistant, Becky Prager; Jennifer Bergstrom, VP and Publisher; Louise Burke, President; Jennifer Long, Associate Publisher; Lisa Litwack, Art Director; Liz Psaltis, Director of Marketing; and Wendy Sheanin, VP of Marketing at Simon and Schuster. An extra-big hug to Senior Publicist Meagan Harris and VP and Publicity Director Jennifer Robinson, who've offered so much support to all three of the novels I've published with Gallery Books.

I rely totally on the council and guidance of the stellar staff at the Gernert Company, especially my agent, Stephanie Cabot, who always has my back. Thanks to her assistant, Ellen Goodson, and Director of Marketing Anna Worrall, and to the tireless Rebecca Gardner, the VP and Rights Director, who has given more of a boost to my career than she will ever know.

Finally, I'd like to thank the staff at Graceland for giving me such a kind welcome, even as the author of a unfinished book about the King. A special shout-out to the security guard who took me behind the velvet rope for a closer look at a Stutz Blackhawk. “Don't tell anybody I let you touch it,” he said, and I promised that I wouldn't.

Never trust a writer.

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LAST RIDE TO GRACELAND

Kim Wright