by Jack Yeovil
Once he signed up with the Colonel in 1956, Elvis Presley had become just another Dancing Chicken, and the music thing had gone crazy.
Outside it was getting dark. Elvis turned the lights up, and stretched out on the couch, letting all the old pains fade away.
He had been yanked from Sun Records, where Sam Phillips—who said that a white man with a black sound would be worth a million dollars—had developed his style, and switched to RCA Victor, where he got his first taste of the corps. The hits came thick and fast—“Heartbreak Hotel,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Hound Dog,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up”—and he’d been walked through some movies. Love Me Tender, swivelling his hips as a cowhand just after the Civil War, Jailhouse Rock, Loving You, King Creole. They hadn’t been so bad, but then came his draft notice, and, away from the Colonel, he had time to do some thinking.
In the army, the music had receded. It seemed a lot less important somehow than learning to drive a tank. That had been just like driving the pick-up truck he had been working before the music hit big. Elvis had always loved to be behind the wheel of a powerful machine. That was one thing that never changed. At first, the army had been a circus, being shifted from unit to unit, his whereabouts guarded more jealously from the fans and the press than a secret weapon. Once billed as “the Nation’s Only Atomic Powered Singer,” he had found his military niche trucking nuclear weapons around testing sites in the desert. It made sense; the expected news clamp-down on the atomic tests also covered up his presence, and at last he was just another dogface GI, angling for some NCO insignia. People stopped asking him to sing in the barracks, and, surrounded for the first time by guys his own age rather than the Colonel’s wrinkled carny cronies, he had started questioning the way his career was being handled.
Back then, everybody in his life wanted him to be something: Sam Phillips wanted him to be a white negro; Vernon and Gladys wanted him to be a movie star as big as The King, Clark Gable; Colonel Parker wanted him to be a younger Dean Martin who shat gold; the fans wanted him to take every girl in America between the ages of fourteen and nineteen into his bed; the TV censors wanted him to stop shaking his hips while he played and sang; Jerry Lee Lewis wanted him to die tragically and make way for a new King of Rock ‘n’ Roll; the Hollywood moguls wanted him to be the new James Dean, the new Marlon Brando, the new Cary Grant; Billy Graham and Jimmy Swaggart wanted him to stop, period, even if he swore only to sing Gospel, claiming the Sin wasn’t so much in the words as it was in the music; and Mr Seth… well, Mr Seth wanted something he wasn’t talking about… maybe, Mr Seth wanted his soul. Only the army seemed to be interested in him being just plain Elvis A. Presley, US 53310761.
He had all his records, boxed up and locked away, but he almost never got them out. He didn’t even have a system that could play the 78s. Nobody else remembered any more, so why should he? If you turned on the rock stations, all you got was Petya Tcherkassoff, Vania Vanianova and all the other Soves who had copy-catted his style. America had lost rock ‘n’ roll sometime in the ’60s floundering under the weight of British heartache drivel, and the Russians had bulled in with the beetroot beat. Good luck to them.
He had got out of the army in 1960, having risen to buck sergeant, and the Colonel had a whole life waiting for him. Hollywood movies, a TV show with Frank Sinatra, a stack of songs. And a new contract which gave Elvis nearly half of what he earned. It was time for the chicken to dance again. He had seen what was coming. An endless procession of fluffily idiotic scripts, no-balls songs, willing women in bikinis, a mansion which was less of a home than the old Presley shack. And throughout it all there was Colonel Parker, raking in the money, forcing him to bow his head, tying him up with contracts that would outlive him. Mr Seth wasn’t around much any more, but his grinning skull photograph remained with all the others in Parker’s office. The Colonel turned his family against him, bought off Mama and Papa with the comforts they had never had, and paid friends to spy on the valuable bird. The hot plate was heated up regularly, and the Dancing Chicken screamed unheard pain while the audiences called out for more.
He turned on the teevee, without watching or listening, flicking the channels at random.
The crisis had been in October, 1960. Everybody remembered where they were when they heard the news about JFK. Elvis had been in the back seat of his mama’s pink Cadillac with a prom queen. When the news came on the radio, interrupting Connie Francis’ “Among My Souvenirs,” the girl, her hair set solid in a Jackie Kennedy bouffant, broke down and cried. Then, the whole country seemed to be falling apart along with the Kennedy marriage. Elvis remembered that awful, public struggle as more traumatic than any of his own heartbreaks. After all, when Jackie found her husband, the Democratic presidential candidate, in bed with that Hollywood blonde, the world had been shaken. Suddenly, no-hoper Richard Nixon, who had looked like Boris Karloff next to Kennedy’s Errol Flynn on the televised debates, was in the White House, and things were different.
On the pornochannel, a hairy-legged satyr was extensively coupling with a green-gilled underwater nymphet. The pounding close-ups reminded Elvis of a documentary about open-heart surgery, and he skipped channels.
Rock ‘n’ roll was out of favour in 1960, anyway. There were insurrections against it, against the Devil’s music. There was mass burnings of records in major cities, and stern parents forced their teenagers to renounce the Devil’s music. Buddy, Eddie, Ritchie and Gene were dead in cars or planes and then, in January 1961, the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart led a march against Madison Square Gardens in New York, where Alan Freed, Mr Rock ‘n’ Roll, was welcoming in a rockin’ New Year with nineteen acts and twenty-five thousand fans. Elvis shuddered to think that he had nearly topped that bill; only the Colonel’s ridiculous demands had kept him out of the bloodbath. The National Guard had had to be called in to quell what everybody called the Rock ‘n’ Roll Riots. They had raged for three days, and President-Elect Nixon branded the Devil’s music as a greater threat to the moral fibre of the nation than communism, organized crime and poverty rolled together. When the riots were over, Freed, Chuck Berry, Harvey Fuqua, Jackie Wilson, Little Richard and three thousand others were dead, and Jerry Lee Lewis, Swaggart’s cousin, was crippled for life. Elvis imagined Lewis sitting angrily on his piano stool, dead from the neck down, straining to move his hands, bashing his forehead against the keys.
To the Colonel, the wave of anti-rock ‘n’ roll feeling that swept across the country just meant more tuxedo tunes, bubblegum movies, and Las Vegas lounges. He said that Elvis Presley could outlive rock ‘n’ roll and that “nobody likes that nigra yelling no how.” He could have been right. Suddenly, the Billboard charts were full of Pat Boone singing milk-and-water gospel, nice white girls singing nice white songs about nice white dresses, and crappy English Invasion mush from Ken Dodd, Mrs Mills, Matt Monro and Valerie Singleton. Some senate sub-committee set up a ratings board for all music recordings, handing down rulings like a national school principal about what was and was not permissible. The record companies all caved in and drew up their own code, enforcing a strict ban on electric guitars and saxophones that would only be overturned in the early ’70s by David Cassidy, decreeing that all live performers should stand up straight like schoolchildren giving a recital. Frankie Avalon, Fabian Forte and Bobby Zimmermann scraped through; Sheb Wooley, the Platters and Tuesday Weld didn’t. There was a sudden dash for the milquetoast mainstream, and performers who couldn’t adapt to the new style were out of the business.
He had a meeting with the Colonel, and Mr Seth, back from overseas, turned up with a new contract the size of a telephone book. For hours, they explained it to him. There were TV specials, a film in Hawaii, the rights to cover “Tears for Souvenirs” and all Dodd’s vomit-making hits, an income for life. And in the background, while the Colonel was talking at him and Mr Seth was just sitting there behind his dark glasses, Elvis could swear that he heard Robert Johnson singing about the hellhound on his tr
ail, about meeting the Devil at the crossroads, about taking the Greyhound Bus to Hell. That had been his crossroads, and he had walked away from it without dipping the pen into a vein and signing his name. He had been set to star in G.I. Blues for Paramount in the spring, but it had been put off for over a year while the Colonel tried to put one over on Hollywood. After the rock ‘n’ roll riots, studio hatchet men had been through the script with a scalpel, taking out anything that might possibly be construed as rock ‘n’ roll-esque, substituting pure pap. Two days before he was due to report to the Paramount lot, where he was supposed to sing cute songs to puppets, babies and Juliet Prowse, he had hitch-hiked from Hollywood to Los Angeles and found a recruiting office where he could sign up again. He was immediately switched to OTC and started going for his captain’s bars.
On the teevee, the world was going to Hell faster than Johnson’s Greyhound Bus. That foxy Lola Stechkin was standing beside more smoking ruins, trying to look sympathetic but gorgeous as she interviewed the survivors of another catastrophe. It was space aliens in flying saucers, a survivor was claiming.
The Colonel had sued him for everything he had, of course. And had got most of it. It was a miracle that he couldn’t attach any of his earnings as a soldier. Elvis set up trusts to take care of Vernon and Gladys, and disappeared into the army for twenty-five years.
The last he had heard, the Colonel was trying to do something with his chicken recipes. Mr Seth had just faded back into the night. Elvis dreamed about him sometimes. He had never figured the financier out. The Colonel just wanted enough thousand-dollar bills to fill the Grand Canyon. Mr Seth had something else in mind, some deeper, darker purpose. He couldn’t listen to Johnson singing about Blues That Walked Like a Man without thinking of Mr Seth.
Lola and an expert were talking about sunspots. Next up was going to be an interview with a hunter who was claiming to have captured Bigfoot. But first, the station was going over to RalPPH, to see how the Blotto Lotto was going. Elvis zapped the channels and found an old movie. Rebel Without a Cause, one of his favourites. He watched the film for a few moments, then realized that all the young, confused actors—James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, Nick Adams, Dennis Hopper—were dead. Through freak accidents, violence or suicide. Adams had been a friend for a while, until Elvis found out he was snitching for the Colonel. He found a cartoon show about a Spanish-accented burro with bio-implants fighting crime, and let it run. Pepe the Robomule kept saying “hee-haw,” and declaring himself “a stobborn crusader for josteece.”
The army had been easier than rock ‘n’ roll. He had seen action in Grenada, Nicaragua and Israel, and become a Colonel himself. He would have stayed with the service all his life, but in the late ’70s he noticed that he was increasingly being asked to fight on the wrong side. Not just the losing side, as a rebel from way back he was used to that, but the wrong side. And he wondered whether his orders were coming from the President of the United States or some Japcorp boardroom. He still thought Nixon had been a hell of a good president—they had met when he received his Congressional Medal of Honour after the taking of Havana—but everyone since had been in the pocket of the corps. The army paid for his Zarathustra treatments, kept him in shape, kept him out of the craziness. But it couldn’t be a shelter forever.
In 1987, coming out of the service, exchanging his uniform for civilian leathers, he had felt like Rip Van Winkle. So much had passed him by while he fought for his country.
America was a different place. Great stretches of it were desert, and there were predators out there. The corps were running the show, buying justice for themselves. And the gangcults—homicidal hoodlums—were quarrelling for whatever territory the corps were willing to deed to them. The people came last in the queue for everything.
Just about the only thing he could honourably do was become a Sanctioned Op. He knew he couldn’t make much of a difference, but he wouldn’t have been half the man his Pa had raised him to be if he didn’t try. And so here he was, the sole owner and sole employee of the Hound Dog Agency, operating out of Memphis, Tennessee. His skills had found a use at last.
His phone rang. Too tired to stretch a hand out, he let the answerphone cut in.
After the message, a clear female voice sounded out.
“Colonel Presley, I know you’re there. My name is Krokodil. Would you kindly pick up the phone and take this call. It is worth one million dollars.”
IV
The ceiling fan revolved lazily, not doing much good. Roger Duroc lay naked on the bed, looking at the hotel room through mosquito netting. The insects were hell in the city, swarming all over the place. No matter how many screens you put up, you couldn’t keep them out. The Ancien Grenouille Hotel had balconies with elaborate ironwork railings, but it would be asking for the death of a thousand bites to step out on one during the daytime.
According to a documentary he had seen on the teevee in some other anonymous hotel room, the world’s insect population was exploding. Man might find things heavy-going, what with all the toxic wastes and poison leaks, but the hardy bugs were thriving. New species were being discovered every day. Out in the Great Central Desert, there were apparently foot-long ants, barely able to haul their exoskeletons along, and a plague of locusts was chewing up everything in its path somewhere down in Nicaragua. Daniel Ortega was accusing President North of bioengineering the strain as a weapon of war, and the US Government was issuing strenuously unconvincing denials. This was the age of bugwar. Even the gangcults had bioweapons in some cities: the Virus Vigilantes of Detroit had wiped out the Black Dragon Tong with a breed of killer-skeeters that did nothing but lay poison eggs in people wearing Black Dragon colours.
Beyond New Orleans, in the swamps, there was apparently a resurgence in the living fossil population. The trilobites were growing to the size of dinner-plates and nipping unwary waders, passing on nasty diseases. Duroc couldn’t be sure, but he thought it all had to do with Nguyen Seth and the Dark Ones. Anything that could produce the Jibbenainosay would find a mere race of prehistoric lice easy to pull out of the black top hat. Despite his supposed position in a Christian Church, he hadn’t cracked open a Bible since his spell in the seminary. But he knew that plagues of insects were one of the seals of the Apocalypse.
Across the room, her dark body indistinct in the gloom, the girl was fussing with the contents of the hospitality fridge.
He had brought Simone from her apartment. She passed the time, and was in no hurry to leave him alone. He discovered that she had been a high school student out in one of the Delta communities until the indenture men came by with papers and forced the town to hand over a goodly portion of its youngsters in lieu of taxes. Most of the girls had wound up in a vehicle components factory in Natchez, run by a GenTech subsidiary, but the overseer of the program had found her appealing and cut her out of the herd for his own. She had resisted him the first time, but once the bruises healed she found it easier to go along with the man.
She was a typical Delta breed—a little black, a little Cajun, a little Choctaw—but the overseer classed her as negro, and the indenture program was heavily biased against blacks. As Duroc understood it, the indenture laws had been pushed through the Mississippi, Tennessee and Florida legislatures by affiliates of the Ku Klux Klan. Washington wasn’t happy, but didn’t want to push the issue in case the Southern States tried to secede again from the Union. This time, they might get away with it. Ollie North was not Abraham Lincoln.
It all seemed paltry to Duroc. If these people knew what was really going down in the world, all the hot air would be over with and they would have to do something. Perhaps that was why so many people refused to believe what was happening all around them. After all, if you tried to deal with the fact that the fundamental laws of physics were being repealed en masse, your head started to hurt and you needed a brewski, a burger and a snort to make the pain go away.
Simone brought him a tall green drink with lots of ice and fake fruit in it. She
still had the traces of stripemarks on her back. He sipped his cocktail, and ran his fingers over her scars.
The overseer had passed her on to the GenTech East CEO at the plant. A traditionalist to the core, the Japanese executive went in for tea ceremonies, long baths and the pleasures of the whip. Then, a few private pornovideos later, she had been sublet to Mink Hat, the young man she had been with at Fat Pierre’s. She believed he was still turning over a percentage to the corp. Duroc wondered how those earnings showed up on the company books. “Exploitation of Assets”? “Leasing of Lubrication Equipment”?
In Salt Lake, he had been given sundry goods to buy his way where money was no good. He had opened his magic suitcase and offered her a selection of drugs, but she politely declined. She drank only mineral water from the well-stocked fridge. She didn’t even want to eat anything, although Duroc guessed she was on the point of starvation.
All she really wanted was to stay.
Duroc didn’t care either way. Simone Scarlet was as good an accessory for his disguise as any. She expected so little, asked so little. He felt under no pressure from her. It was almost as if she were a blank onto which he could project whatever he wanted from a woman. Last year, there had been Sister Harrison in Salt Lake, but she had been caught in adultery with another man and publicly stoned. She was in a coma. Since then, Duroc had only known a succession of interchangeable bodies, interchangeable smiles, interchangeable cheerleader strips. Kandi, Randi, Mandi, Sandy, Cyndi, Mindi, Nikki, Vikki, Rikki, Buffy, Muffie. Simone Scarlet was perhaps the first American girl he’d had sex with whose first name didn’t end with an “i” sound.
