Losing Graceland (16 page)

Ben and the old man played cards for an hour. Casino and War. Ben couldn’t believe how excited the old man got when it was time for War.
One
—he’d say, laying down the first card.
Two
—he’d say a little louder, laying down the second card. Then he’d hold up the third card, foot tapping on the floor, and he’d turn it over and shout
Three!
and it didn’t matter who won because he laughed every time.

It rolled past two and Ben got tired but the old man insisted he stay up with him and tell him stories about his childhood.

“That’s funny,” Ben said.

“What’s funny?”

“You wanting to hear anything about my childhood.”

The old man smiled, slowly. “The money’s all gone but you stayed. I can’t think of one person in my previous life half as loyal.”

“Loyal,” Ben said. He lay back on the couch bed, staring at the ceiling. “I think I’m still here because I don’t want to go back.”

“Then don’t. Keep running.”

“Like you?”

“I didn’t run.” The old man closed his eyes. “I became a ghost. Now, come on—tell me what you were like as a boy. And don’t leave nothing out.”

Ben talked until three, the old man’s eyes occasionally fluttering shut, but every time Ben stopped talking, he mumbled for him to keep going. So he told the old man everything. Details he’d forgotten about his first kiss (she wore a yellow blouse with buttons shaped like monkeys), about his first fight (the headlock and basketball-chucking incident), and the phone call from his uncle, the day his father died (
Benjamin, are you sitting down and are you somewhere safe?
).

The old man’s eyes were closed and his chest slowly moved up and down as if he were asleep. Ben thought maybe he was. He sat up and the springs creaked. The old man jerked awake and licked a spit bubble off his lip. He stared at Ben.

“How long your daddy been dead?” he said.

“One year.”

“Been almost fifty years since my momma died. Sunday nights … whew. Still hard. You dream about him?”

“Sometimes. My mom dreams about him every night. She still talks to him.”

“I still talk to Jesse.”

“Your twin brother?”

The old man nodded. “He died a long time ago. Age of the dinosaurs.”

“But when you talk to him it’s more like talking to yourself. You don’t think he can actually hear—”

“Sure I do.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Sure is.”

Ben bit his thumbnail. He thought if he could trade sanity for believing his father had transcended death, he just might do it. Not only would it mean his father never died, but it would give him his own sense of immortality. Death was his greatest, most enduring fear. Death made him desperate. For a girlfriend, for money, for direction. He lived in constant awareness that he had only so much time, even less if he included bad luck. The promise of immortality would mean no more desperation. He could take his time. He could wander, aimlessly, without guilt.

Suddenly it made sense. His mom speaking with his dad in her dreams; the commuters who gripped their steering wheels and buzzed past his apartment building every morning; the Palisade Mall walkers in their gleaming white sneakers, fat asses waddling in time with their flabby arms; the annoying women in their Home Shopping Network suits who clipped coupons and waited outside the front gates of Harold’s to get their husbands two-for-one Italian silk ties. It was all a battle against desperation. You could drink yourself silly and smoke ten bowls of high-grade skunk, you could shop, you could obsess over ex-girlfriends, or you could go
crazy. Let your mind decay. Believe your dead twin brother was listening from the grave.

And Ben realized he couldn’t do it. It was too late. His last enduring fantasy had been as a boy, when he believed his father was the gateway to a giant world. Behind his father lay oceans swimming with monsters, and empires with kings who sat in their mountain halls, and exotic women dancing with veils covering half their face. His father as big as the moon, and behind him a world bigger than anything he ever knew.

But grief had shrunk the world to something he could fit in his pocket; now this old man had taken it out and replaced it with his own tiny world.

“You have to accept that your brother is gone,” Ben said. “If you don’t, you can’t process what happened.”

“Sounds pretty smart,” the old man said.

“It’s closure.”

The old man frowned, eyes shut. “Closure is bullshit. Life goes on and that’s good enough. Your momma needs to talk to her dead husband, who are we to say he don’t talk back?”

“Does Jesse talk back?”

The old man thought for a moment. He opened his eyes and struggled to focus on the young man sitting on the edge of the couch bed.

“No,” the old man said. “But that don’t mean he can’t hear me.”

It was bright as two suns the next morning, a clear sky the color of a Miami swimming pool, cars thrumming past the Take 5 Motel while Mexicans trimmed hedges lining the parking lot. The noise roused the old man, who found himself in his cushy chair with a
stiff neck and dry mouth. Sheets lay in a ball at the edge of the bed. The room smelled like a shower. He found the bathroom lights on, and sprinkles of foundation powder in the sink.

He grabbed the clock radio and held it up because he couldn’t find his glasses: 11:33. He saw the little half-Asian girl had ironed his clothes and laid them out on the couch bed.

The old man lurched into Denny’s, dressed in a motel bathrobe, freshly shaven with his hair combed back and dots of toilet paper lining a constellation across his neck. He wore a new pair of brown-tinted aviators he’d bought from a sunglass kiosk in the plaza across from the motel.

Ben and Ginger sat in a booth, finishing their breakfast. They spotted him and waved him over.

Ben laughed. “Jesus, look at him.”

“He’s a fucking god,” Ginger said.

The young Mexican woman behind the register stared at the old man’s bathrobe and slippered feet.

“Sir, I don’t know if you can wear that in here.”

He grinned. “I got a big show today and I don’t want to get food on my new clothes.”

“But I don’t know if you can wear that in here.”

“Course I can. Beautiful women are sympathetic. So what do you say?”

She bit her lower lip, then smiled a little and grabbed a menu. The old man led her to the booth and squeezed himself next to Ginger.

“Cheese omelet and eight strips bacon.” The old man pushed away the menu. “Darling, make that bacon nice and crispy. I like it when it crumbles.”

Ben told the old man he’d gotten the particulars—the contest
was being held in the Little Valley Convention Center. Two
P.M
. start. Thirty-dollar entry fee, five-thousand-dollar first-place cash prize. Two categories: Sun Records Elvis and Aloha from Hawaii Elvis. The woman on the phone told Ben there’d been a third category last year—Vegas Elvis—but no one could tell the difference between Aloha from Hawaii Elvis and Vegas Elvis.

The old man listened as best he could. He still hadn’t found his prescription glasses and everything was blurry—the fat kid and his girlfriend eating at the next table over, the manager wandering down the rows, eyes darting from table to table. His pinky throbbed and he had to take a shit, and the idea of doing anything other than sleeping in a dark motel room suddenly filled him with dread.

Nadine, he thought. Remember Nadine.

The old man bit into a piece of bacon. “Five thousand isn’t much but it’ll have to do. We finish by six, we should be at Hank’s before sunset.”

“Where does he live?” Ben said.

The old man took another bite. “Hank’s family got a big house in Redstone Ridge. Last time I saw him, he told me was going to take care of his sick momma. Almost fifty years ago. Now, does time fucking move or does time fucking move?”

Then he stood and bent forward until his back cracked, and he dropped a crinkled twenty on the table. “I’m going to get ready. Give me an hour alone.”

Storm clouds swept in, carried on winds that blew hedge trimmings across the motel parking lot, lifting straw wrappers and Styrofoam clamshells from the Denny’s Dumpster. The motel
manager told Ben it was the ghost of Elvis—every year it rains during the tribute contest, he said. No matter how sunny the day of, a storm blows in like something out of the Bible.

Ginger tried running on the treadmill in the motel exercise room, watching Jerry Springer on the television mounted high in the corner above a water cooler. Ben knocked on their room door and knocked again, then he opened it, bracing for the worst—the old man in a puddle of puke and piss, eyes bulging and lips blue, empty pill bottle cupped in his cooling hand. Instead he found him sitting in the cushy chair in the corner with the shades drawn, dressed in his underwear.

Slivers of light banded the old man’s face; dark forehead, blue-gray nose, dark mouth, blue-gray chin. In his lap Ben saw a shotgun, long and lean. Rain began its tap against the windows. Thunder grumbled softly.

“Old boxers never lose power,” the old man said. He sounded like he was speaking in slow motion. “They don’t have the speed anymore, so they learn misdirection. That’s what Hank told me. Make their opponent watch the paunch jiggle and wiggle, then
bam
, hit that sonofabitch. Hank and I used to go to the fights. Get ourselves a couple seats in the shitty part of the arena, way up high … what’s that called. Something about a bloody nose …”

“The nosebleed section,” Ben said.

“That’s right.
Nosebleed
. We’d sit up there, chewing tobacco, spying all the pretty girls. Man, the two of us were a sight to behold. I’m telling you not a woman in Tupelo was safe.”

The old man slowly drummed his fingers on the shotgun.

“What’s wrong?” Ben said.

“Nothing.”

“You seem nervous.”

“Hell, no. I don’t get nervous.”

“What’s with the shotgun?”

“I like the way it feels. You ever shoot a gun?”

“No.”

The old man held up the shotgun. “Line up some cups on the bathroom sink and take a few shots.”

“No thanks.”

“Go ahead. I’ll pay for damages.”

“With what money?”

“I’ll sign some fucking pillowcases. Now go on and take this.”

“I said no. Don’t ask me again.”

The old man lowered the shotgun. “If I’d known what a pussy you are, I’d have hired someone else.”

Ben smiled. “If I’d known you’d give all my money away, I’d have taken a job at the mall.”

The old man snorted, a little tremor that jerked back his head. “You ever call that leggy blonde? One with the scar on her lip?”

“Alex? No.”

“Too bad. She had a sexy way.”

“Yes she did. I think I screwed up.”

“There’ll be others. Always are.” He stretched his right arm overhead with a wince. Then he rubbed his eyes and sang to himself softly, his voice cracking and unsteady. “
Walk on through the wind, walk on through the rain, though your dreams be blown to shit. Walk on, ye Pharisees and motherfuckers. Walk on.
” He cleared his throat. “Say, you think your little Chinese girlfriend can sew on my lion’s head buckle?”

“I’ll ask her,” Ben said. “But she doesn’t seem like the domestic type.”

The old man tried to answer but decided to keep quiet; instead he hummed softly, listening to the rain.

They had to park in the farthest corner of the Little Valley Convention Center lot, a massive blacktop sheet covered in rows of cars, pickups, and choppers. Families ran, screeching children and cursing parents huddled under umbrellas and hats made from folded magazines, while the rain fell so hard Ben could hardly hear the cars splash past. They had no umbrella and no magazines, so they walked, Ginger with her arm hooked over Ben’s and the old man trudging on while rain soaked his hair and new clothes, his rattlesnake silk button-down shirt, his tight white pants and shiny black boots. He wore his lion’s head buckle, sewed on with dental floss by a surprisingly adept Ginger. Ben had insisted on dropping them off at the entrance but the old man refused. “We arrived as a trio and we’re walking in as a trio,” he said. “So if you don’t mind getting wet, I’d rather we walk together.”

Ben saw how nervous the old man was, how he sat in the backseat and stared out the window, fingering an orange pill bottle that Ben hadn’t seen before. Whether it was from a previous stash or he’d found another dealer, it didn’t matter—the old man was a serious pill fiend and, Elvis or not, Ben thought he needed to be in tip-top shape to stand any chance of winning. But it was too late because his voice was slurred and his eyes swayed like a ship in a storm. Walking through the rain, Ben figured, was a last-ditch attempt to clear his head.

Then he started to sing, this lone figure with his pale gut hanging over the mane of his gold lion’s head belt buckle and rain dripping off his sagging chin. His voice lifted above the wind;
Ben realized if he sang in the contest half as good as he sounded now, not only would he win, but the entire convention center would rush the stage as if Jesus himself had returned for a onetime-only repeat performance of his Sermon on the Mount.

They stepped onto the sidewalk below a massive banner that read
Welcome Elvis Tribute Artists and Elvis Fans from Around the World!
A young man dressed in a black leather jumpsuit stood under the overhang, puffing a cigarette and tapping his foot. His hair was jet black, slicked into a spiky pompadour, an updated fifties greaser with a thorn vine tattoo encircling his wrist.

The old man made his thumb and forefinger into the shape of a gun and aimed it at the young man; he pulled the trigger. The young man winked back.

“Looking good, old-timer,” the young man said, and Ben thought, If only you knew.

The old man stopped in front of the double doors and took a deep breath. Through the glass Ben saw an ocean of people. Folding tables stood in front of small stages where judges in blue polo shirts busied themselves with paperwork. Exposed metal rafters ran across the high ceiling like train tracks. The back of the room was filled with a giant center stage, and roadies worked on the lights and smoke machines, shouting and sound-checking and stomping officiously in their tan workboots. There were high-haired women and their husbands with every kind of mullet—the largest single gathering of mullets in North America, Ben figured. He saw food stands and souvenir kiosks and T-shirt air-brushing stations. Two massive screens hanging from the rafters showed dual Elvis movies—“Jailhouse Rock” and “Harum Scarum.”