by Ben Adams
“Fuck that,” he said, tossing the bowtie out the window, the silk wafting like litter into the dry gutter.
A little before five, John parked on Alamo Street, next to the gas station. He didn’t park directly in front of the trailer park, but he could still see its entrance. People came and went from every trailer except one, the one in the photo. Its driveway was empty, its windows dark. He didn’t know when the man would be home, so he waited.
John lifted the armrests and stretched out on the front seat. He put the gun on the floor next to him, just in case someone tried sneaking up on him. Like Mrs. Morris. The sun was setting, but he’d hear the locked doors rattling, or her licking the window.
Working for Rooftop, John was used showing up to an empty home, having to entertain himself until whomever he was supposed to be following showed. Most detectives would get on their phones, amuse themselves with addictive games, ninja birds destroying candy, Viking farmers complaining about retirement, but John tried to utilize his time, be productive.
He pulled out a pen and a pad of graph paper. He counted fifteen squares across, then fifteen down, drew a frame around them, embracing the emptiness. On the top row, he counted four squares in, then blacked out the fifth square. He did the same on the other side and at the bottom corners, making it symmetrical. Twenty-eight more squares were blacked out, continuing a pattern of balance. He wrote ‘Moving Day’, his theme, across the top of the page. It was a recreation of a puzzle he’d been working on since graduation.
It had a grand premise. All the definitions were going to read like standard puzzle definitions, leading the solver to think it was about moving into a new home, but once they solved the theme words, the fifteen-to-twenty-eight-box-length phrases, they’d realize that it was really about unexpected transitions, the large and small occurrences that force people to adapt and change.
Four empty squares along the top row waited to be filled and John wrote a single letter in each box. A word. He added another word underneath it. He tried writing a clue that would give them some meaning beyond the standard definition, some existential subtext that an astute crossword solver would appreciate. Tapping his pen against the pad, he found nothing deeper than what existed in the dictionary. John erased the words, leaving rubber splinters where letters had nested. He scrawled new words, new clues, but they failed to conform to his criteria, and he wadded up the paper, tossed it on the floor.
He didn’t have this problem in college, the inability to stack words, their letter arrangements creating words within words, then give them clever clues. Since leaving the purchased comfort and community of school, he’d been stuck, uninspired. ‘Unable,’ as his friends would say, ‘to do the work.’
* * * *
Ten o’clock. Everyone had gone out for the evening, leaving the trailer park empty, no lights in the windows, vacant parking spaces.
The street lamp above John flickered out and darkness absorbed the street around his Saturn sedan. It was getting late. The Stuff ‘n Pump night manager locked the front doors and pulled down the gate, closing for the night, his employees heading home.
Midnight. Trailer park residents returned home from the bars, trying to drive straight, parking at odd angles. They stumbled from their trucks, up their trailers’ makeshift steps. Lights flipped on and off in each room until there was darkness.
3:00 a.m. If the man in the photo wasn’t home by now, he probably wasn’t coming home tonight.
John grabbed the universal lock pick gun he bought at the police supply store. He’d bought it for moments like this, but so far he’d only used it to open his front door when he’d locked himself out. He got out of his car and pulled up his sweatshirt’s hood, looking around as he quietly crossed the empty street.
He walked up the trailer’s homemade steps. They wobbled underneath him like they were built with the assistance of a six-pack, not a level. He crouched down on one knee and put the pick gun in the lock. John held another pick in his right hand. He set it in the lock and started aligning the pins.
On the street, the recognizable rumble of an engine, music, and drunk driving. A truck swerved into the trailer park.
John quickly looked around, wondering where the truck might be headed. Every trailer had a car, truck, motorcycle, ATV, go-cart, or riding lawnmower parked near it. All except the trailer he were he knelt. The man in the picture was home.
John stood, lost his balance, and fell backward off the steps. He landed on his back and crawled and picked himself up off the broken gravel drive and ran and hid behind the trailer’s hitch and propane tank.
The truck turned down the stretch of gravel that started at Alamo Street and ended at the trailer John hid behind.
John peered around the trailer wall as the truck’s headlights panned the trailer park, its rusty folding chairs, satellite dishes loosely hanging by their cables, pieces of fiberglass insulation, sleeveless flannel shirts drying on car hoods. Finally, the lights landed on the trailer where John hid. Illuminating the dangling lock pick gun.
John spun behind the trailer. He made a fist and slowly, silently, tapped his head in penance. How he could be so stupid, so careless? How could he have let Rooftop down? If the man in the photo saw the pick gun, he’d run and John wouldn’t get the answers he needed about the photo. Or the dead reporter. He breathed heavily and told himself to calm down. There had to be a way to keep the guy here, to keep him from running. John lifted his head suddenly and his eyes widened like he had been abruptly woken from a nap. He had an idea. It was a bad idea, but it was all he had.
He peeked around the trailer.
And reached for his gun.
But there was nothing.
His thumb caught on his belt as his hand passed over the emptiness where his clip holster should be. He had left his gun in the car.
The truck turned and headed down the row of trailers, coming right for him. The man would see the pick gun, would know John was there, would speed away, knocking over trashcans, waking his neighbors, leaving John trapped behind the trailer while everyone stumbled into the street, investigating the late night racket.
The truck parked in the driveway, its headlights went dark. John peered around the corner. The doors opened. Out stepped a skinny teenager with acne and an overweight older woman. They started kissing. She shoved the kid against the trailer John hid behind. She grinded against the kid, shaking the trailer, causing the lock pick gun to jiggle, almost fall from the lock. The woman grabbed the kid’s shirt, dragged him to the trailer next door. They spent several minutes at the door making out, then disappeared inside. A stereo blared .38 Special’s ‘Rockin’ Into the Night’. In between songs, odd noises, like farm animals eating, came from the trailer.
John walked back up the steps. The lock pick gun hung from the door knob. John knelt, gently pushed it back into the lock. A click. The bolt slid free of the doorjamb’s plate. The door opened. It was unlocked.
The trailer door creaked open on rusting hinges. The interior screen door hung loose in its frame, broken. Most of the wire mesh was ripped, no longer protecting the trailer from insects or collection agents.
The trailer, green with a white stripe down the center, employed a thin layer of dirt to show its age. Unwashed and corroded. Dirt and rust had consumed the elegance of the antique road palace. John stuck his head inside the dark trailer and listened, but didn’t hear any shuffling footsteps or drunken snores. He stepped inside, turned on his flashlight. Empty beer cans and dirty clothes. Unopened mail on the collapsible kitchen table. He flipped through junk mail addressed to ‘Resident’, nudie magazines in sealed, plastic bags, store bought. No bills. No address labels. Nothing that could tell him the guy’s name. John was hoping for a mountain of unpaid bills, or pink envelopes stamped ‘Final Notice’. But they were strangely absent.
In the living room, dirty clothes lay on the floor, couch, everywhere. An empty fish tank with a couple of trophies in it slept on the couch like a weekend house gu
est overextending its stay. The trophies were topped with little gold figures kicking the air in frozen Karate poses. John removed a couple from the tank, checking the engravings. ‘Cincinnati, OH, March, 1998, Third Place’. ‘Kokomo, IN, June, 1995, Fourth Place’. ‘Spokane, WA, October, 1991, Third Place’. And a blue ribbon from Springfield, IL, for participating. The statues were all engraved with different names, not the man’s name, but the names of others. His version of identity theft. John frequented garage sales on his free weekends and was familiar with trophies like these. The man in the photo probably bought them from someone’s mom trying to make Diet Coke money.
John shined the light around the rest of the room. The curtains were drawn, guarding the man from prying neighbors, or protecting neighbors from seeing him walk around shirtless, slapping his gut, scratching himself.
A small, flat screen television, its wires running out the window. John moved the blinds and followed the wires to a neighboring trailer, up the side to a satellite dish. Pirated cable.
Black and white pictures were tacked to the wall opposite the couch. There were several of Elvis, but they were not the normal fan photos. In one, Elvis is standing by the front door to Graceland, surrounded by Elvis impersonators. It was easy to tell which one was Elvis. He was the focal point of the picture, standing between large columns, framed by impersonators. And he was the only one not wearing a sequined jumpsuit.
In other photos, Elvis is surrounded by armed, uniformed men, leaving hangars, boarding helicopters or planes. A white haired man wearing an Air Force uniform is standing near Elvis. They are laughing or talking, the man looking at Elvis fondly, with pride, while other officers are a few steps behind. In one photograph, Elvis is in a hangar. He is wearing earphones and holding a long range microphone in one hand and a hotdog in the other. He isn’t looking at the surveillance equipment. Instead, he is looking down at a dollop of mustard on his shoe. In another, Elvis is standing next to a circus ring watching men jousting on alpacas. One man has been thrown from his mount and is lying in the center of the ring. Elvis is grumbling and handing money to the man with white hair. The man is laughing, adding Elvis’s cash to a stack of bills. John wasn’t sure if the picture was of military training or a wealthy man’s entertainment.
Next to the Elvis pictures were aerial photos of what looked like military installations. Buildings were circled in red ink. The names ‘Area 51’, ‘Los Alamos’, ‘Dulce’, or ‘S-4’ were written on them. Before he left Denver, John researched Elvis conspiracies and found photos like these. They were typical of someone obsessed with the perception of a hidden truth, the belief that something in Elvis’s history was being kept from them.
Sitting in the car, he had wondered what he’d find in the trailer. He thought, if anything, there’d be a few pictures of Elvis, flattering images printed from websites, taped to the wall. But he didn’t expect this. He looked closer at the photos, the paper stock, the edge and grain of the print. They weren’t copies. They were originals. This guy had hid in the bushes and taken these photos.
Like John.
But they were nothing alike. This guy acted out of some delusory belief that Elvis had a secret past. John took pictures of naked men in the back of a Payless Shoe store rubbing latex balloons on each other, waiting until he could earn a living writing puzzles.
John kicked some beer cans out of the way and headed to the kitchen. Dirt had saturated the small kitchen’s linoleum cracks, staining the floor brown and gray. When John walked, his shoes sounded like band-aids being removed. Pliers replaced the missing knobs on an electric range. The sink overflowed with dirty dishes, plates covered in food remains, chicken bones, BBQ. He shined the flashlight on them. The crusted food looked preserved, like a furniture store display of wax fruit. John sniffed the sink. No rancid food smell. He opened the cupboards. Peanut butter. Jar after jar of peanut butter.
The refrigerator door’s fake wood paneling had cracked, a disguise peeling. Magnets decorated with pictures of half-naked women and beer logos had fallen on the floor. John opened the fridge door. The refrigerator was filled, crisper to fridge light, with bananas.
The pantry continued the single-item theme. It was stocked with bags of bread.
Peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
The guy’s obsession with Elvis extended to his diet.
One more room, the bedroom. An accordion door separated it from the rest of the trailer. Age and lack of maintenance dulled the magnet lock. Screws stripped the holes holding door to frame. John jerked on the handle and the door came out of the wall.
The bedroom looked like the aftermath of a manmade disaster. Clothes were piled on the unmade bed. Fast food bags, junk food wrappers, plastic cologne bottles, tiger-striped bikini briefs, internet-purchased male enhancement pills, tubes of hair dye, and bubble wrap carpeted the floor. John had seen trailers like this working for Rooftop, recognized the debris of a cheating husband. He half expected to see used condoms everywhere, but there weren’t any.
On the other side of the bed, a built-in dresser and closet completed the furnishings. The dresser’s drawers hung half-exposed in various stages of evacuation.
John pulled on the closet door but it stuck, the cracked mirror rattling. The plastic hook on the top left corner had broken off and only three hooks attached the mirror to the door. He put his hand on the loose corner and jerked the door, popping the magnetic latch. John shined the flashlight inside and was blinded by light reflecting back in his face. He moved the flashlight off to the side, away from the reflective surface, hoping to get a better look.
And there it was.
Hanging in the closet.
The uniform so closely associated with Elvis that when someone mentioned his name you saw him wearing it, on stage, sweating, the lights reflecting off it and into the eyes of a nostalgic crowd in a Las Vegas theater.
A white sequined jumpsuit.
“No way!” John whispered in the dark. He removed the jumpsuit to get a closer look. It had a high, stiff collar covered in shiny, gold stars. A giant, red, white, and blue eagle made of fake jewels, framed by gold stars, bedecked the back. John didn’t count the stars, but he was sure there were fifty. The same pattern adorned the front of the jumpsuit, except the eagle was split by the slit that divided the suit’s chest. Smaller eagles were perched on the shoulders, with several gold stars showering the sleeves, like the eagles were pooping freedom. Similar eagles flittered down the outsides of the suit’s legs, ending in large flairs. A belt, easily a foot wide, decorative gold chains dangling from it, eagles flying around it, hung around the suit’s waist. A giant, gold eagle glittered on the white belt buckle. The jumpsuit was the flashiest thing he’d ever seen. The flash and glitz of the Vegas Strip on polyester.
Black patent leather boots, freshly polished, rested on the closet floor.
John examined the suit reverentially, checking everything, the fabric, the sequins. It appealed to his art student aesthetics. It was old, flashy, distracting, popular. American. It was everything he was supposed to love and hate, making it the best thing he’d ever seen. He took several pictures with his phone, sent them to friends, and to Rooftop.
From the photo, John had expected the man to be the kind of person he’d become familiar with working for Rooftop, another slob cherishing and despising his own indecency. After seeing the jumpsuit, the photos tacked to the wall, John figured the man fit into two categories, an Elvis impersonator, or a fan obsessed with the speculative side of Elvis.
John hung the jumpsuit back in the closet and heard the flutter and shuffle of falling paper. He shined his light on the closet floor. A yellow piece of paper, folded over three times. He lifted it and illuminated the image of a naked woman eating a double bacon cheeseburger on a take-out menu from a strip club on the interstate, with a Truth or Consequences mailing address. Evidence connecting the guy in the picture to the reporter.
John took a step back, crushing an open bag of potato chips. Ho
lding the menu, he felt flattened by its implications, that the guy in the photo had lured the reporter away from town with the promise of a story, meat loaf, and shaved bush, then killed him. John shivered. He spun around and looked over his shoulder, terrified by the realization that he was in a murderer’s home. If he’d learned anything from his Survey of Slasher Films, 1978 to 1986, was that being alone in the killer’s house never went well for anyone.
He crammed the menu into his pocket and wiped everything he had touched with one of his hoodie sleeves. He leapt over piles of dirty clothes and closed the accordion door, putting the frame’s screws back in their holes. In the kitchen and living room, he scrubbed every handle and surface where he might have deposited his fingerprints, and left the trailer, trying not to knock anything over. The cluttered mobile home embodied the consequences of unpaid credit card debt, but John still didn’t want anyone to know he’d been there. If the man returned home, saw that someone had been in his house, he’d run, or come after John.
Outside, John shut the door, leaving it unlocked. He heard the neighbors snoring and quickly scanned the lot and street, making sure that it was empty, that even the street lamps were sleeping.
He drove back to The Sagittarius Inn, careful not to turn on the headlights until he was beyond the trailer park. He thought about driving all the way back to Denver, calling the local police once he’d crossed into Colorado and telling them about the reporter and the trailer, but the reporter was killed doing what he loved. And all John could think was that if he were killed for one of his puzzles, he’d want someone to find out who did it.
John parked a few doors down from his room. The motel was empty except for a few bikers passing through. John crawled under the cotton comforter and thin blanket. The parking lot lights leaked through curtain cracks, highlighting peeling wallpaper.
