Last Ride to Graceland Read online

  “What’re you singing tonight?” one of the servers calls over. He obviously started drinking at about noon and he’s already sunburned. I don’t know why he’s talking to me. I guess he’s just trying to be nice.

  “Haven’t decided yet,” I call back. He’s tilted so far in his chair that he’s about to go clattering onto the deck.

  “ABE,” he says with a wink. “Anything but Elvis.”

  How the hell does this boy know I don’t sing Elvis? I squint at his grinning face, trying to decide if he’s one of the return kids and I’m supposed to remember him from last year. I don’t think I ever slept with him, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it. I don’t have a good memory for faces, or names, or the capitals of South America, or the order of the presidents, or anything in particular except song lyrics. I can hear a song once and know all the words, which is a useful gift when you’re a troubadour for hire. When you’re a girl who works the waterway, moving from one club to the next and never quite sure what her clientele du jour will be. Motorcycle gangs one night. Golfers the next. Then a place that caters to snowbirds from New York and Pennsylvania, those states where it seems like nobody ever stays home. So I have to be prepared to cover any song they request and I can, up to a certain point.

  But every place that hires me knows I won’t play Elvis. I can’t. I don’t know exactly why. I start up and something always happens. My throat closes or I get a cough or I stumble around with the lyrics, have trouble calling them up even though I know every line, as good as I know my own name.

  Here’s the perfect example. There was a night almost exactly a year ago, again at the start of the summer, when I was sitting on this same deck, maybe even sitting at this same table and looking out at the waterway at just this same pretty angle, but on this particular night two rather odd things converged at once. The first was that my mother came in. Or I guess I should say she came out. She must have come into Bruiser’s and walked through the indoor part, all the way through to the deck, which was crowded that night, and it took me a moment to spot her. Mama hardly ever dropped by Bruiser’s, and never without Bradley, much less on a summer weekend when the place was packed. And—stranger yet to say—she climbed up on one of the high-top chairs that somebody had pulled over by the railing and she ordered herself a peach daiquiri. It was what she drank when she drank—a rare occasion in itself, just birthdays and cruises—but she liked those fruity, brunch-type cocktails that come with flowers and fruit bobbing in them.

  It threw me to look up and see her sitting there by herself, raising her drink to me and smiling as I started my set. It wasn’t like she hadn’t heard me sing a thousand times, even though she’d heard the Church Cory a lot more than she’d heard the Bar Cory. But I still think I would’ve been okay with it if the second strange thing hadn’t happened right on the heels of the first. I opened with Van Morrison’s “Moondance”—one of those rare songs that’s appropriate for any situation, including the sight of Laura Berry Ainsworth sitting on a high top drinking daiquiris all alone on a Saturday night—and then this drunk Yankee (is there any other kind?) yells out, “Play ‘Blue Suede Shoes.’ ”

  “Blue Suede Shoes”? Seriously? Nobody covers that, and besides, like I said, Bruiser’s isn’t the kind of bar where people get liquored up and start screaming out requests at six in the afternoon. I didn’t know what to say. He was loud. It would’ve been impossible to pretend I didn’t hear him, so I obligingly started up with the “one for the money, two of the show” part, but then I segued it into something else. Some sort of old rockabilly, Jerry Lee Lewis or some such, and I slid off the bar stool and worked the crowd, walking between the tables with my guitar, because people like that. If you sing hard enough, they forget what you’re singing, and even the guy who wanted “Blue Suede Shoes” seemed okay with it. So I dodged that bullet. I’d avoided singing Elvis without having to directly say ABE into the microphone, which sounds weird and bitchy, considering that I sing everyone else. Only when I looked over, Mama had gone. Her chair was empty, except for the daiquiri glass perched on the wooden railing, just a little puddle of pink sludge left in the bottom.

  I’d hardly ever known Mama to drink, but I’d never known her to drink fast. Later, much later, when she finally told me how sick she was, I put two and two together and figured out that the night she showed up alone and unannounced at Bruiser’s to hear me play was also the day she had gotten the diagnosis. Not just breast cancer, but stage three with a certain very rare mutation that makes whatever’s going to happen to you happen fast. The ragin’ Cajun kind of cancer that takes you from daiquiris to the funeral home in five months flat.

  Gerry is coming back, with the note in his hand. “Okay,” he says. “I wrote down everything your daddy said to tell you. First off, he says the water’s rougher than it was last year. They’re surf fishing, not going out in the boat. That’s why he needs his waders.”

  I nod.

  Gerry nods. “He says you’re probably thinking that, shit, it’ll cost a blue fortune to ship ’em all the way down there, but you gotta remember how big his feet are. Big old stupid feet you can’t fit into regular waders. He’s the one who said that. Not me.”

  I nod.

  Gerry squints down at the note. “So he says to go out to his fishing shack on Polawana, you know the place, and get them. He says they’re in the shack, not the shed, and I’m supposed to stress that. The shack, and not the shed, got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Don’t go in the shed.”

  “I won’t go in the shed.”

  “Because the waders are in the shack.”

  “I think I can remember.”

  “And send them to him collect on delivery at the Clear­water PO.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He crumples the note in his hand. “What’re you playing tonight?”

  “Beach Boys. Maybe even a little Chairman of the Board, some Drifters. You know, the summer stuff. Herald the start of the season. Give ’em what they want.

  “Good girl.” Gerry starts to walk away again but he turns back one more time. “And remember,” he says. “Look in the shack, not the shed.”

  “Jesus,” I say. “It’s like you guys think I don’t have any sense at all.”

  When I get to Bradley’s three acres on Polawana the next day I head straight for the shed. I don’t go out to Polawana very often. It’s Bradley’s equivalent of a man cave, where he goes to fish with his buddies, and it’s where he would escape sometimes, when the pain of watching my mama fade away got too much for him. And even those rare times I’ve gone out there, I don’t think I’ve ever bothered to venture all the way to the shed. It’s right on the water, just this dilapidated little hunk of rotted wood where he keeps parts for his boat. My shoes slide in the muck as I make my way down the hill, holding on to the reeds to steady myself as I go.

  I’ve already gotten the waders. They were right inside the door of the two-room shack, leaning against a wall and looking kind of scary, like the legs of a man whose top half has gone missing. I carried them out and put them in the driver’s seat of my Toyota and then, on second thought, I strapped them in. And I should have driven away then and there, task completed, but there was something in the way that Bradley and Gerry had both kept saying “The shack, not the shed” that filled me with some nameless, nonsensical desire to visit the shed. That’s how my mind works. When Granny would leave the house, she’d say, “Don’t stick beans up your nose,” which she meant as a joke, obviously, since there’s absolutely no reason why a sensible person would stick beans up her nose. But the words always hit my soul like an order from God, right up to that day when I was seven and wound up at the regional hospital and learned firsthand that getting a bean extracted from your sinus cavity is a profoundly unpleasant experience.

  And another profoundly unpleasant experience might be waiting for me at the bottom of this hill—20/20 stuff. Dateline. Southern Fried Homicide. I’ve seen all the shows and every one of them starts the same way, with some asking-for-it girl out poking around by herself in the boondocks, just like I am now. But I walk over to the shed anyway and look through the grimy, cobwebbed window.

  All I see is a car.

  Actually, all I see is a piece of a car, a bumper. One of those low-slung muscle car bumpers, and it’s surrounded with bubble wrap. Not just one layer of wrap, but more. I pull back from the window and knock a spider out of my hair.

  It takes several yanks before I get the door unstuck and manage to roll it up. When I do, I see the whole vehicle, pointed straight at me. The tires on one side have gone flat, making it tilt off center, and the bubble wrap, crisscrossed at several points with duct tape, has turned what must have once been the clean, elegant lines of the chassis into a lumpy, gray mass. But there’s no denying that this machine has power. A wounded tiger’s still a tiger, after all.

  There is no way on God’s green earth that Bradley and Laura Ainsworth ever owned a car like this.

  For a moment I can’t decide what to do. I try to circle the car, but it’s so big that it’s claimed the whole shed, with the back bumper pulled up all the way to the wall. I edge sideways along the driver’s side, running my hand over the bubble wrap, half of it popped, and all of it dusty. I look around for something to start cutting the duct tape, but it seems that all the shed holds is the car. There aren’t any fishing tools out here, or any parts for a boat. There never were. It doesn’t shock me in the least to learn that my mama spent years holding something back from me, but the fact that Bradley helped her hide it? For some reason, that shocks me to the core.

  There’d been a knife up in the shack. A fishing knife laying on the counter beside the sink, with a long, curved blade, and likely sharp. I scramble up the bank and get it, holding it out as far away from me as possible while I slip-slide my way back down, because with my luck I’ll probably lose my footing and impale myself and my body will roll right into the river and I’ll never be found.

  I get back to the shed and try and figure out where to start.

  I don’t want to puncture the wrap and scratch the car, but it takes way more effort than I would’ve guessed to saw through the duct tape, so I decide to tackle one corner at a time. First the tape, then the bubble wrap, then the beach towels beneath that. First there’s one that says HOTEL CALIFORNIA and another one that says SUPER BOWL X CHAMPIONS PITTSBURGH STEELERS. Another one says ALOHA FROM HAWAII and has a big orchid.

  But when I peel back that final layer of 1970s nostalgia, the left bumper on the driver’s side is freed and for the first time I can see what I’m working with. The car is black. Shiny. Its cocoon has left the finish just as flawless as the day it rolled off the dealer’s lot. And when I give the next segment of bubble wrap a yank, a whole clump falls off at once, revealing the flank. I put my hand on the driver’s-side door and, with a prayer to nobody in particular, open it.

  The interior is red. Leather everywhere. Everywhere except where there’s gold. Not tarnished. Shiny as God, even now. A Styrofoam cup sits in one side of the cup holder, the rim smudged with cherry red lipstick. There are other cups in the floor of the passenger side, along with crumpled paper bags. A napkin, flecked with brown, as if someone tried to wipe chocolate off their mouth. And a map. A plain old filling station map like I remember from my childhood, the kind that was always impossible to fold back into eight perfect segments. The person who last drove this car didn’t even bother trying. The map accordions its way across the red leather seat and onto the floor. Sunglasses, oversized, aviator style, dangle from the rearview mirror.

  And there’s a smell that wafts up too—not the mustiness you’d expect, or the raw, wet decay of the river, but something subtler and more refined. A woman’s perfume, spicy and sweet, some scent they don’t make anymore, mixed in with a darker, more masculine aroma. The horse-barn smell of tobacco.

  I’ve opened a time capsule.

  I leave the knife stuck in the riverbank and struggle up the hill to my own car. It’s about as far from a muscle car as you can get, a gold Camry, and I hop in and drive to the Exxon station on St. Mary’s Island. They call everything an island around here, but it’s all really just fingers of land connected by bridges, and the only thing separating one so-called island from another is marsh. They have a pay phone at the Exxon just after you come onto St. Mary’s, a whole booth sitting right off the road and probably one of the last pay phone booths left in Beaufort, if not the world. When you break up with AT&T, you start to notice these things.

  I keep change in my own cup holder, and as my fingers flick through the quarters, I think back on that Styrofoam cup in the black car, that perfect little imprint of a woman’s mouth. Did my mother ever wear lipstick like that? It doesn’t seem likely. I was born in ’78, in that trough somewhere between the hippie years and the disco years, and the bright raspberry pink crescent on that cup was such a scream of color that I can’t see anyone in that era wearing it. Certainly not here, in Beaufort, where decent people’s lips are just one shade darker than their skin.

  It was stage makeup maybe. One of the last remnants of Mama’s time on tour.

  I dig out six quarters. Walk over to the phone booth and look for the yellow pages, but of course the whole book is gone. All they’ve got is a black plastic cover flapping at the end of a chain. I have to go inside to ask for help, and the kid working the register doesn’t have a phone book either. He just looks the numbers up on his iPhone, eyeing me suspiciously when I tell him what I need. One of the requests is dead common in these parts, since anybody who has a car break down calls Leary, but the other?

  I don’t meet his eyes. I pick up the ballpoint pen on the counter and write one number on one arm and the other number on the other arm. And then I walk back out to the phone booth.

  Leary answers on the first ring and says he’ll meet me at the shack in twenty minutes. Then I twist my arm so that I can read the other set of numbers, which I wrote kinda screwy since I was trying to hurry. It pops me into a menu, of course, telling me how to buy tickets and book tours, and all the prices and hours, but I keep pushing zero, and after a few minutes of “Love Me Tender,” an honest-to-God person comes on the line.

  “I think I may have found a piece of Elvis memorabilia.”

  The Graceland operator is most notably unimpressed. To be fair, I bet they get these calls all the time. People who see the perfect image of Elvis’s face on a piece of burned toast, people who hallucinate and think the King spoke to them in a dream. But when I tell the woman that my mother toured with Elvis as a backup singer from ’76 to ’77, her tone of voice becomes slightly more enthusiastic and she says she’ll have one of the authenticators call me back.

  Authenticators. That’s quite a word.

  “He can’t call me back,” I tell her, craning my neck to look at the road. This rigmarole is taking longer than I thought and Leary’s going to be at the shack any minute. “I don’t have a phone.”

  I realize that’s a strange thing to say to somebody when you’re talking to them at the time on a phone and I might have lost some credibility points. But she says, “Just a minute,” kind of flat and disinterested, like maybe she’s just going to go to the bathroom and then come back and tell me she’s real sorry but she couldn’t find an authenticator.

  Now the wait song is “Jailhouse Rock.” I listen through three whole choruses before a new voice comes on the line. A man. Older sounding.

  “Whatcha got?” he says.

  Whatcha got. Not the warmest of greetings. The lady might not have believed me, but she at least had that singsongy politeness that people who work in tourist destinations all seem to have.

  “What I have is a 1973 Stutz Blackhawk,” I tell him, and my voice starts shaking like I’m about to cry. “A black coupe. And I’m thinking that most likely it’s the car Elvis Presley drove on the day that he died.”

  That jerks him around. There’s dead silence on the line for a minute, which I kind of enjoy, and then he says, “Now who did you tell me you were?”

  “I didn’t,” I say. “But my mother was Laura Berry and she toured with—”

  “Good God,” said the man. “Good God. Are you trying to tell me that you’re Honey’s daughter?”

  Honey? I don’t know what this old duffer’s talking about, but at least I have his attention. “I found the car in a shed—”

  “And how is our sweet Honey Bear?” he says. “Is she there?”

  Your sweet Honey Bear’s dead, I think, but somehow I can’t bring myself to say the words out loud. “Who is this?” I ask. “Who am I talking to?”

  He says his name’s Fred and starts rapid-firing all sorts of information. How he ran the road tours back in the day, how he knew my mother. What a pretty little thing she was, just as sweet as her name, and then he gets going on how if this car I’m talk­ing about is the real McDeal—that’s just how he says it, the real ­McDeal—then it’s far too precious to be driven. If it’s the real McDeal, it’ll need to be hauled back to Memphis.

  “You know,” Fred says, “if what you have there truly is the last of the Blackhawks, then the only person who ever sat behind the wheel of that particular car was Mr. Elvis Presley himself. Which is why we can’t let anybody else drive it now.”

  I hate to pop the guy’s bubble, but obviously that’s not true. Elvis died in Tennessee and the car’s in South Carolina, so unless this old coot is saying a ghost drove the Blackhawk from Memphis to Beaufort—which I wouldn’t put it past a Graceland authenticator to suggest—somebody else must have sat behind the wheel. Most likely my mother, Laura Berry Ainsworth, aka Honey Bear.

  “Didn’t Elvis give a lot of cars away?” I say weakly, although I know for a fact that he did. I’ve read all the biographies. I’ve made a study of the man. “Isn’t there a chance he might have given the car to one of his backup singers?”