by Micah Nathan
“It is.”
“I like it, man. Kinda looks like a small dragon. What do you think of these boots?”
Ben nodded. “Shiny.”
“I like the heels,” Ginger said.
In the checkout line the old woman working the register did a double take, life flaring into her tired eyes. Her hair was blue, the same shade as her Wal-Mart apron. She wore rose-colored glasses, thick as windshields.
She scanned the first item. Silky button-down. Bad to the Bone collection.
“Looks like you’re going to that tribute contest,” she said.
The old man nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Aren’t you a little old?”
“I’m a lot old.”
“You sort of look like him,” she said. “If he’d made it out of Graceland alive.”
She scanned the second item. White poly slacks. Elasti-comfort waistband.
“I remember when Elvis first came out,” she said, grabbing the boots. “My parents were scared of him. What he did with those hips …”
E-Z Slide gaucho boots. Genuine Leatherine.
“Then he went to the Army. Cut off that gorgeous hair and took the rebel right out of him, like Delilah did with Samson. He wasn’t the same after that with all those silly movies.” She shook her head and counted the cash. “It only got worse from there. The gospel songs, the Vegas years. And the way he treated his wife.” She pursed her lips and folded the pants. “I never understood what she saw in him. A pretty woman like that, putting up with all his cheating and drug abuse. I tell you what I would have done—”
“Not a goddamn thing,” the old man said.
The old woman looked up. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me,” the old man said. Ben shot Ginger a worried look and he gently took the old man’s arm.
“We really should get to the hotel—”
“You wouldn’t’ve done a goddamn thing,” the old man said. “You don’t think Priscilla had her own toys to play with? You don’t think she made secret phone calls and told me she was going to lunch when she was really lying on her back while some GODDAMN HANGER-ON LAID PIPE?”
“Priscilla was a faithful wife!” the old woman shouted. “Everything I read—”
The old man pounded his fist on the counter. “Lies. Every one of them. Gossip rags and traitors threw me into the fire. Made me into the bad guy. Fuck them, and fuck you for believing it.”
Shoppers turned and stared. Out of the corner of his eye Ben saw a tall, heavy man lumbering toward them, dressed in white short-sleeve shirt and tie. His Wal-Mart name tag read Bill Sawyers, Manager.
“This gentleman cursed at me,” the old woman said. Her voice shook and Ben saw spittle collecting in the corners of her mouth. “He cursed at me and physically intimidated me—”
The old man hammered the counter with his fist again. He didn’t like the way it sounded, so he hammered it once more. “She’s goddamn right I cursed at her. Nosy old cooze sticking her business where it isn’t welcome. Don’t say a goddamn word, Bill Sawyers. Thirty years ago I’d have my boys haul your fat ass in the parking lot and whip you like a rented mule—”
Bill Sawyers put his hands on his hips. “Sir, there’s no reason for threats. Now, if you’ve already purchased your items …”
“It’s not his fault,” Ginger said, stuffing the black boots into a bag. “Everything was fine until this cranky bitch started talking smack.”
The old woman put her hand to her chest. “Excuse me?”
“Oh, don’t act all proper like nobody ever called you bitch before.”
“Sir, if you’ve already purchased your items, I’m going to ask you all to leave. I don’t want any trouble but—”
“Then tell that cranky bitch to keep her mouth shut.” Ginger glared at the old woman. “Go on and say something. I’ll knock your dentures the fuck out.”
Ben stepped between Ginger and the old woman. The old woman yelled. Ginger yelled back. Bill Sawyers raised his voice.
The old man slung the bag over his shoulder. He looked around the store, at the people who stared. Hazy memories of every place he’d ever been. Jackson. Montgomery. Austin. Vegas. Vegas. Like a sponge that sucked everything in and wrung it out dirty. Last bastion of the irrelevant. Corporatized freak show. Dress it up however you want, drizzle it with sex appeal and a heartbreaking tremolo, but it’s always been about the freak show. Suddenly he longed for the dark of his Cheektowaga home. The quiet of his side street in the winter. Snow plowed into dirty mountains, anorexic trees, and Baywatch reruns.
Remember Nadine, he told himself. It’s about Nadine. All that matters.
The old man pulled Ginger away and Ben stayed behind, apologizing to the old woman and apologizing to Bill Sawyers, Bill nodding as if he understood that these sorts of things happen with delusional old men.
As they walked through the automatic doors, the old man took a deep breath. “You tell them I was sorry?”
Ben nodded.
“Good. Sometimes I forget my place. I don’t ever mean to be angry.”
The night air was cool and damp, and the quiet of the bare parking lot sounded nice. The old man realized he couldn’t remember what kind of car he owned. Might be a wisteria-on-white Caddy, he thought. Then again, it might not.
12.
hey spent Friday night in a ground-level room at the Take 5 Motel, an engine idling outside the front windows. The Denny’s restaurant sign glowed across the parking lot. Ginger lay asleep in bed and the old man had pulled out the couch, Ben fitting the sheets while the old man tucked the corners of a blanket under the thin mattress. Then the old man sat on a cushy chair in the corner, feet flat on the dark green carpet with legs apart, hands on the armrest. He was slightly stoned from the Percocet and a couple tabs of codeine he kept in his pocket. That old feeling of floating felt good, warm and easy like a bath on a summer night.
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.”
