In Those Dazzling Days of Elvis

by Josephine Rascoe Keenan

  “There is a bus,” I told the cabby, handing him the fare. “Keep the change.”

  “Thanks. I was going to drive you myself, if there wasn’t a bus,” he said. “I’ve got a daughter about your age. Be careful, and good luck.”

  My watch said ten after midnight. Taking a seat in the waiting room as far away from anyone as I could get, I ticked off the minutes until the bus would leave.

  It crossed my mind that I had enough time to call Carmen. I looked around. A pay phone hung on the wall next to the rest rooms. I was halfway to it, change in my hand, when I had second thoughts.

  She had done the unthinkable by keeping Mama’s death from me. I couldn’t imagine why she would do such a cruel thing. Maybe she was trying to protect me. She knew that I was quite literally trapped out here. There was no way I could come home hugely pregnant. Or maybe she’d feared such news would bring the baby on early, which it had. No matter what, news like that had to be given immediately to the next of kin. Because simply nothing made sense, I decided to catch her off guard by showing up without warning.

  At twelve forty-five, my bus pulled in. I visited the restroom and then bought a soda pop and a sandwich to take with me. I was starving. The call over the public address system to board the bus for El Dorado, Arkansas, with stops in Texarkana and Magnolia, didn’t come until one o’clock, the time we should be leaving.

  I took the first seat up front across the aisle from the driver. The man smoking the cigar was the only other passenger. He took a seat midway back. I thanked my lucky stars to see a compartment at the rear of the bus labeled “Restroom.”

  The driver had collected our tickets and gone back inside when I noticed a black car pulling into the parking lot. My window on the bus was nearer the passenger side of the car, so I wasn’t able to immediately see the face of the woman who emerged from the driver’s side. As she circled around the rear of the car and headed toward the entrance to the bus station, her face came into full view. It was Oldenburg. In one hand she clutched a manila envelope. The papers.

  With brisk steps, she went through the swinging doors, nearly colliding with our driver on his way back out to the bus. Reason told me she’d case the waiting room first, then check the ladies’ room. I had enough time to get away, if the driver moved fast.

  He sprang up into his seat and turned the ignition key. The bus rumbled to life. Through the plastic window of the swinging door, I saw a distorted version of Oldenburg rushing toward the restrooms. I looked back at the driver. He was thumbing through paperwork.

  “When do we leave?” I asked. “It’s already ten past one.”

  “We’re going. Keep your pants on,” he said.

  Shoving the gear stick into reverse, we crept backward out of the parking space and away from the loading dock. Just as he put the bus in drive, Oldenburg came flying out through the swinging doors, waving the envelope.

  I could see her lips moving, but I couldn’t hear her over the roar of the bus’s engine. The driver, intent on negotiating the long vehicle out of the lot, appeared not to be aware of her at all.

  I watched her shaking her fist as the bus pulled out. I watched her until we began our turn onto the next street. I watched for as long as it was possible to keep her in sight. Just before she slipped out of my line of vision, I saw her open the car door and crawl back inside. Pressing the lever on the side of my seat, I leaned back and tried to relax.

  I had escaped.

  —||—

  The Dallas lights had passed by for only about a half hour when the driver turned hard and we pulled into another bus station. I sat straight up.

  “Why are we stopping?” I asked him.

  Not answering me, he called out, “Fort Worth.”

  “Why are we stopping here?” I repeated as he got up and started down the steps to exit the bus.

  He looked up at me like he thought I didn’t have good sense.

  “Pick up passengers, of course. And let some off. This’ll be a quick one.”

  The two passengers joining us boarded quickly, and within minutes the driver was back in his seat, starting the engine. Just as we were heading out, I saw the black car barreling into the lot, the horn blaring in the garish lights of the station. Oldenburg leaped out and ran toward the bus, waving the envelope above her head.

  This time the driver saw her and braked. He reached for the hand lever to open the door of the bus.

  I rushed down the aisle and into the cubicle restroom. Inside, I slid the latch on the door and held my breath.

  “Where is she?” Oldenburg’s brassy voice demanded.

  “Who’s that?” the driver asked.

  “The young woman. Is she on this bus? She’s trying to skip town without signing these papers. She has to be stopped.”

  “Ma’am, you can see there ain’t but three folks sitting in here. What kinda papers you got? A warrant for somebody’s arrest?”

  “No, no! Adoption papers, if it’s any of your affair. She’s refused to surrender her baby for adoption.”

  “Well, if that don’t beat a hen a peckin’.”

  She challenged him. “Are you sure there’s no one else on this bus?”

  His voice dropped. “There is another passenger in the restroom, but it ain’t—Stop, ma’am. You can’t go no farther down this aisle without a ticket. And you sure can’t go charging into that restroom.”

  “Is it a woman?” Oldenburg asked. “In the restroom?”

  I was done in. I had my hand on the latch when I heard the driver say with a chuckle, “Not to my way of thinking.”

  I could imagine Oldenburg’s perplexed face in response to that. After a beat, she said, “Oh, well, why didn’t you say it was a man? Sorry to hold you up, sir.”

  Sounds resonated back to me of her going down the steps of the bus and the door closing. I waited until we had been moving for quite a while before coming out of the restroom. Thrown one step backward for every two steps forward by the rhythm of the bus, I made my way up the aisle and fell into my seat.

  In a while, the driver looked over at me.

  “How old are you, girlie?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Right. You’re a girl still, by my way of thinking. I knew you weren’t no woman.”

  He lowered his voice. “Are you the one that dame was ahuntin’?”

  “What dame was that?” I replied.

  He smiled.

  —||—

  We bumped along in the night through stretches of oilfields and scattered clumps of pine forests. We traveled down Main Street in every little town on the road and picked up passengers in most of them. We sailed over asphalt and bounced over gravel and potholes. Sleep was impossible.

  My reflection rode beside me in the window. I watched her smooth her hair and tuck it behind her ears. I struggled along with her to get comfortable on the hard seat. It was as if Carmen were sitting with me. I longed for her to be real so I could ask her why she hadn’t called to tell me about Mama. But she remained only an illusion, reflected in the window by lights turned low for sleep that would not come.

  Mama’s ghost flitted in and out of my mind—her every gesture, her arched eyebrow of disapproval, her infectious laugh that I’d heard too seldom, her soothing words of comfort when I was distressed. She had never been sick a day in her life. Had a stroke taken her, as it had taken her own mother before her? Or had there been an accident? The paper surely would have made a front-page story of a car wreck. But no matter the details, the biggest question remained—why Carmen hadn’t called to let me know?

  I had just managed to doze off when a loud pop sounded from under the bus, followed by sounds of flapping. We swerved. The driver wrestled with the wheel as we wobbled to a stop in a clearing by the side of the road.

  “Must have lost a tire,” he said, rushing down the steps and jumping off the bus.

  A male passenger sitting in back got off with him, and from the window I watched them squat to check the tires, t
hen stroke their chins. In a few minutes, they got back on the bus.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the driver said, “we’ve had a blowout. Fortunately, we’re only two miles out of Texarkana, so we ought to be able to limp on in if we take it real slow.”

  And slow it was. It took us almost thirty minutes to get to the station in Texarkana. Once there, the driver told us to get off the bus and wait inside.

  “How long will take to get us back on the road?” I asked the ticket agent.

  He looked up at the clock on the wall behind him.

  “Maybe upwards of an hour,” he said, looking past me at a customer in line to get a ticket.

  It was already going on four thirty. The funeral was at ten. I wanted someone to erase from my brain the indelible reality of Mama’s death. I wanted someone to hold me and tell me everything was going to be all right. But there was no one to do either. So I took a seat and waited, and waited, and waited.

  At seven that morning, they called us to board the bus. One more stop in Magnolia made it ten forty when we pulled into the Trailways station in El Dorado.

  I was late for Mama’s funeral.

  Chapter 33

  THE SEARCH FOR MYSELF

  I was too exhausted to walk the five blocks to the Methodist church. I had never ridden in a taxi in El Dorado, but when I saw one letting a passenger out in front of the bus station, I hailed him.

  “Where to?”

  “The First Methodist Church, and hurry.”

  Traffic was congested around the square. It was ten of eleven by the time we arrived.

  “Wait for me,” I told the driver.

  I dragged myself up the long flight of steps. Inside, vapors of smoke lingered above extinguished candles. The sanctuary echoed my footsteps. A janitor sweeping between the aisles looked up at me.

  “The funeral, is it over?” I said, struggling to catch my breath.

  “Gone to the graveyard,” he said. “’Bout ten minutes ago. You just missed ’em.”

  I moved as fast as I could back outside to the cab.

  “Can you take me to the cemetery?” I asked the driver.

  “It’ll cost you.”

  “Just drive.”

  For a moment, my mind registered as odd the bustling streets, as if it were an ordinary weekday. But of course, the town wouldn’t shut down for my mother’s funeral.

  We crossed over the railroad tracks on Main Street by the ice house and headed east. Along the way, front yard gardens wore the fading blooms of summer zinnias and cosmos. Every house, even the rundown ones, looked beautiful to my homesick eyes.

  The driver turned onto Mosby. From the cab window, I could see the stream of cars moving along inside the cemetery gates toward the tent erected beside the grave. Today the bright sun mocked the sad occasion, unlike the time I was here for Frances’s burial. On that sorry day the “rain of fools,” as Mama called it, would have soaked us through were it not for a stray umbrella half hidden under the car seat.

  “You want me to get in that line of cars inside the cemetery?” the cabby asked.

  I hadn’t thought this through. Was I going to barge into the graveside service and announce that I was the real Julie and Carmen was an imposter? I could picture the shocked looks that would take over people’s faces. Where would I say I’d been? Maybe I should hang back and watch from behind a tree. But how dreadful to have to snoop on my own mother’s burial.

  “The tent is not far,” I told him. “I’ll walk. Would you wait here for me outside the gates?”

  “How long?” he asked.

  Still weak from childbirth and barely able to think from the exhaustion of the bus trip, I didn’t have the mental or physical wherewithal to sort out this dilemma. It would depend entirely on what happened when I got closer to the grave.

  “For as long as it takes.”

  “You pay, I wait.”

  “Here.” I yanked some bills from my purse and stuffed them into his hand. “Now, wait.”

  “Hey,” the cabby called as I started my difficult walk up to our family plot. “You some kind of a black sheep in the family or something?”

  How accurate the uninformed can be. “I guess you could call me that.”

  He shook his head and reached for his cigarettes.

  Like someone learning to walk all over again, I negotiated my way up the slight incline, my lower back aching with every step. I was behind the procession and could watch the people pouring out of their cars parked half on the grass and half on the edge of the narrow cemetery road. A large mausoleum sat between me and the ivory tent. I stood partially behind it and peeked around to watch the happenings.

  There was no place for me at my own mother’s funeral. The only thing I could be thankful for was at least I had on a decent dress, although the blue and white fabric in no way approached the appropriateness of Carmen’s black dress, pillbox hat, and gloves.

  I could see her standing front and center beneath the tent beside Aunt Hattie, also dressed in black. The carpool girls hovered on the sidelines—Maylene, Darcy, Laura, Lynn, and even Eugene Hoffmeyer, without Rhonda. Mama’s bridge club crowd, with Mavis in front, stood clumped together near my schoolmates.

  I wished I could just back my ears and go out there in front of them all, squeeze between Carmen and Aunt Hattie, and grieve openly for my mother, but that would ruin everything she had wanted so badly for me.

  The minister took his place in front of the mourners, which also included the lawyers Mama typed for. My cousins and our many distant relatives from all over the county stood, wiping their eyes, some of whom had barely known her.

  Although I scoured the crowd from face to face, I did not see my father. That was no surprise. None of the Morgans would have dared show up. Had Carmen wired or called Claudia in England to let her know?

  My life, before the day we left on the drive to Dallas, had been fairly constant, unchanging, sometimes even boring. The days had strolled by from one year to the next with only the predictable changes that happened while one was growing up. Changes that people had progressed through for millennia. But in the short span of five months that I’d been away, my world had collapsed, almost as if our house had fallen down, leaving me mortally wounded in its rubble. A tornado of events had blown to pieces the walls of my security. My world had vanished, almost as completely as if it had never existed.

  The pastor intoned the ritual words of the burial service. With cracking voices, the crowd sang “In the Sweet By and By.” Carmen laid a white rose on the coffin. Mama should have had red roses. The Lawrence family always buried our dead with red roses covering the casket. But Carmen wouldn’t have known that. She was not of our blood. But why hadn’t Aunt Hattie insisted? There were no answers for me.

  At the end of the song, the pastor announced that lunch would be served back at the church, and the crowd dispersed.

  A man offered his arm to Aunt Hattie. I strained to make out his face. To my stunned senses came the realization that it was Farrel. I should have known by his lean, tall body. I couldn’t piece together why he would have taken off from work to be at Mama’s funeral—busy Farrel, so in a hurry to pull himself away from his roots on the wrong side of town and acquire acceptance by people who thought they were made of finer fabric. My own mother had cherished the idiotic idea that we were descended from Ireland’s blood royal. For all I knew, maybe we were, but it hadn’t made the slightest difference in the circumstances of our lives.

  Carmen appeared to be thanking Farrel. I flinched as he leaned over and kissed her lightly on the lips. He put out his arm and led Aunt Hattie away. After that, the in-crowd girls and Eugene spoke briefly to Carmen and went to their cars, leaving her standing there alone.

  I could not bear this exile a moment longer. Taking quick steps, I moved toward her as she turned to follow Farrel and Aunt Hattie. She paused and glanced around, as if sensing that something was about to happen. She turned to look in back of the tent. Seeing only stragglers g
oing to their cars, she looked again toward the coffin.

  “I’m over here,” I said from a few feet away, in the direction she hadn’t looked.

  Her mouth fell open. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve come to my mother’s funeral. Why didn’t you let me know she was dead?”

  “Oh my God,” she gasped, sinking into a chair.

  “Answer my question, Carmen. Why didn’t you contact me?”

  She stammered, looking first one way, then the other.

  “I didn’t know what to do. I thought you weren’t due for another week.”

  “Two weeks.”

  “Well! I knew you couldn’t come here pregnant,” she said under her breath. “And I knew you’d be so upset you might do just that.”

  “I read in the newspaper about Mama. It brought on the baby early.”

  “I can’t believe it’s you,” she said through a half sob.

  I walked over to her. “But it is. Take my hand. See, I’m real.”

  She did not respond. Instead, she got to her feet, her eyes darting around at the cars as they pulled away and joined the caravan creeping out to the street.

  “You have to go.”

  I frowned. “Go where?”

  “Anywhere, but you can’t stay here. I have to go to the church and take my place beside Aunt Hattie at the luncheon. If anyone sees you, we’re in deep shit.”

  “You never quite learned to talk like I do, did you?” I asked, anger rising in me.

  “Seriously, Julie, you have got to disappear. Go away somewhere.”

  “Give me the key to the house. I’ll have the cab driver take me there.”

  “You can’t go to the house!”

  Her words bounced off my brain. “Why in heaven’s name not?”

  “You can’t let Aunt Hattie see you.”

  “But where else can I go? Maybe it’s time to confess to her what has happened.”

  “If you do, you’ll never get that ‘little something’ from her will. Isn’t that what you and Elizabeth wanted?” Carmen’s voice was shrill, her face fraught with anxiety.