‘Nope.’
‘I gotta piss.’
Elvis stays in the car while Red stumbles out to the nearest tree.
Using the rear-view mirror, Elvis straightens his hair and sport coat. He can ignore Red pissing beneath the oak, he tells himself. This can still be something good. Something meaningful.
Jesse, he says, silently. You here?
The insects sing their reply.
Red slaps the car’s roof. ‘You gonna sit there all night?’
‘Hush up,’ hisses Elvis, climbing out. ‘Folks here are sleeping.’
‘No kidding,’ says Red, casting a glance over the dirt road, the tiny wooden shacks, the raked yards, the woods behind. ‘Must’ve been something, growing up out here,’ he adds. ‘What the hell did y’all do?’
Elvis leans back on the hood and smiles. ‘Played in the creek and them woods. Went to church.’
‘Sounds swell.’
‘See that house, there? That’s where I was born. My daddy says there was a blue light in the sky that night. My twin brother was born first. He was dead already, though. They buried him in the cemetery over that hill. Damn near killed my mama. But I was alive.’
‘A blue light?’
‘That’s what Daddy says.’
‘You sure you ain’t getting it mixed up with that photography place on Beale?’
‘This ain’t no joke,’ says Elvis.
‘I have no idea how I got born,’ Red muses. ‘Apart from the usual way.’
‘Your mama never tell you nothing about it?’
‘Not one thing.’
They stare at the house in silence. Above the roof, the sky is prickling with stars. The paint is peeling from the walls and one of the porch steps is broken. In the yard, a bicycle frame lies rusting among the weeds. The truth is that Elvis remembers nothing about living in this house. But his mama has told him the story of how they had to leave when Daddy went to jail. He sat on the porch while she piled up their belongings around him: a table, two wooden chairs, a trunk, one bed, a washbowl, a couple of buckets. Those salt and pepper shakers she loves so much. But he cannot mention these things, even to Red, so he says, ‘Can you picture it? My brother, dead in a shoebox, and me, bawling and alive. Poor Mama.’
‘It’s real sad, E.’
‘What do you think it means, Red?’
‘Means?’
‘Why did it happen that way?’
After a while, Red ventures, ‘God’s will, I guess.’
Elvis has to stop himself grabbing his friend by the lapels. ‘That’s what I think! But what does that mean?’
Red’s pale eyes avoid Elvis’s. ‘Well, I guess there ain’t no sense to it.’
‘I think about it a lot, you know? I think: why did I live, when he died?’
Red gives a shiver. ‘I ain’t got no answer for you, E.’
‘Why was it Jesse, and not me?’
Red peers at him, frowning. Then he puts a hand on his shoulder. ‘I reckon you oughta just be damn grateful it was you,’ he says, quietly. ‘Now can we please get out of here?’
On the drive back to Memphis, Red doesn’t complain when Elvis sings ‘Old Shep’ three times, followed by two renditions of ‘The Old Rugged Cross’. By the time they reach the city limits, they are harmonising on ‘Farther Along’, leaning together to hit the notes, their own sweet noise accompanied by the rumble of the car’s wheels on the bumpy concrete as they head for home.
Mama has waited up.
She’s asleep on the couch, her head resting on a cushion, her legs drawn up beneath her. Her stockings have been discarded on the coffee table, like shed skin.
He tiptoes over and watches her for a few seconds. It crosses his mind that he could lift her and carry her to bed, but he decides she probably wouldn’t want that, so he kisses her cheek instead.
She wakes.
‘I took Red to Tupelo, Mama.’
She yawns. ‘You did? That’s good, son.’
‘I figured if he’s gonna be a good friend then he oughta see where I’m from.’
She stretches out her arms and pats the couch. ‘Tell me boocups.’
‘It’s late.’
‘Don’t matter. What did the house look like?’
He thinks of the rusting bicycle frame in the yard. ‘The same.’
‘I loved that place when your daddy first built it for us.’
‘Mama, you ever wish we still lived there?’
She looks at him for a long moment. ‘Do you?’
He wonders what she’d like him to say. ‘I like Memphis. But Tupelo will always be home.’
She nods. ‘That’s just about the way I feel, son.’
He rests his head on her arm, and she strokes his hair.
‘I prayed to Jesse,’ he says.
‘I’m glad to hear that.’
‘You don’t think I’m crazy, Mama?’
She sighs. ‘No more crazy than me.’
Graceland, January 1958
As Gladys strides away from the house, taking delicious lungfuls of cold night air, she congratulates herself on making it this far. Her shoes are pinching but she can bear it. She is going out! This is her house, and she is free to leave it. The blue lights illuminate the way to the gate, and Gladys almost giggles, imagining herself yodelling and skipping down the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz. She’d seen the picture for a birthday treat with Elvis and Vernon at the Lyric, back in Tupelo. Stepping into the Lyric was not unlike stepping into Oz itself. There were plush red carpets, tubes of coloured lights seemed to drip down the walls, and huge swags of blue velvet framed the screen on three sides. What had made them all gasp was not the moment when the land turned technicoloured. After all, they were used to seeing the world in colour. It was the moment towards the end of the film, when it dawned on them that the faces around the bed were not only the faces of Dorothy’s loving family, but also of her fantastical friends. Her journey to Oz had been a dream and real, all at the same time. She’d been through the tornado and followed the yellow brick road, but she’d never left her loving family. Gladys had wept and wept.
The night is starlit and still, and the trees make no sound as she rounds the bend. She looks up at the bright moon, and understands why her son chooses to go out at night and sleep during the day. The darkness gives him freedom. In the dark, he is detached from the daily lives of others, and at liberty to do as he pleases.
Of course, Elvis would go plumb crazy if he knew his mama was planning to walk out of Graceland alone at this hour. And until this moment, Gladys hadn’t realised that she’d wanted to. Seeing the fans almost rip him clean in two, and hearing the stories of all the folks who consider her son one step away from the Devil, she’d been glad of the wall, the fence, the security gate and the length of their driveway. But right now she wants something else: to feel the grass beneath her feet; to have her hair curl in the damp night air; to walk along the street alone, without any notion of where she is headed.
Her nephew Harold’s light is burning in the gatehouse. He’s taken over from Vester for the night shift.
‘Howdy, Harold,’ calls Gladys, clip-clopping to his window.
Harold’s head jerks back, and he blinks at her, his swollen eyes a little pink.
She raps on the glass. ‘Open up so I can talk to you.’
Harold scrapes his hair into place, then slides the glass across.
‘Hi, Aunt Gladys,’ he says, with a sheepish grin, ‘Golly! Musta dropped off there.’
‘That’s OK, Harold. I just wanna go out the gate here. Can you open up for me, please?’
Harold’s smile falls. He scratches his cheek. ‘Why, Aunt Gladys, I ain’t too sure—’
‘Only, I’m having trouble sleeping, and I figure a little walk to that paddock over yonder is just the thing I need. I got a hankering to see the horses there. Seeing horses always eases my mind. You know what a country girl your old aunt is, don’t you?’
‘Does Uncle Vernon kno
w about this?’
Gladys taps her foot. The leather of her pumps bites at her toes. ‘Sure he does, honey.’
Harold looks a little doubtful. ‘I ain’t certain Elvis would want you wandering out there all alone, ma’am.’
‘Elvis ain’t here. And you know he’d want his mama to be happy, don’t you? Now open up. I won’t be but fifteen minutes.’
With that, she steps back from the window, crosses her arms, and eyes the gates expectantly. It takes a few moments, and she can hear Harold muttering to himself, but eventually they swing open, and she trots through, head held high, waving at the gatehouse as she goes.
The empty highway is wide and black, the air faintly stained with the smell of gasoline. The electricity wires strung along the street give off a gentle hum, but otherwise there is no noise at all. Once she’s walked a little way along the grassy shoulder, away from Harold’s sight, Gladys pauses. Her shoes are rubbing badly now, and her initial burst of energy is wearing off, but she is still elated to have escaped. A single truck rumbles along the other side of the road, and she gazes after it, wondering what it would be like to hitch a ride across the state line. It’s been a while since she went back to East Tupelo. Lately Vernon doesn’t want to drive there, asking why in the world they would go visit some one-horse town when they live in the best mansion in Memphis.
She walks further, and the light dims. The highway stretches ahead, the dots of its lamps strung out for miles into the darkness. She knows the paddock is at the next turning in the road, but she can’t recall how far that is, having only been driven from the house by her son or her husband. She supposes it would all have been different if she’d learned to drive; she has the pink Cadillac that Elvis gave her, but she’s never dared to get herself behind the wheel. If she had, she might not be stumbling along the shoulder of the highway in these torturous shoes.
The cold air sneaks beneath the hem of her coat, and she pulls her collar tighter. She doesn’t care about seeing a horse, but if she can make it to the paddock then she’ll have proved something to herself. That she can walk alone. That she can do something more than sit and wait for Elvis to call.
She’s beyond the Graceland grounds now, and the trees to one side of her are thicker, the air damper. In an effort to keep her feet from freezing, she steps from the grass onto the edge of the highway, and remembers those nights back in East Tupelo, running along the shoulder after her sleepwalking boy.
Then she hears the rumble of an engine. A car is coming towards her, its headlights illuminating the trees, the rich texture of her coat, the crust of mud on her shoes. She puts a hand up to shield her eyes from the glare, and in the sudden brightness she imagines, just for a second, that her son is driving this car, that somehow he’s made it home from California already. The vehicle slows as it passes her, then pulls in a little way down the road.
Gladys stares at the tail lights, unsure whether to turn and run or to approach the car. The engine is still growling when the driver pokes his head out of the window.
‘You OK back there, ma’am?’ he calls.
In the gloom, she can’t make out much about him, but his voice sounds young.
‘Just fine, thank you,’ she calls back, not moving.
There’s a pause, then the tail lights turn white, and, with a high-pitched whine, the car reverses.
The man kills the engine and peers at her through the open window. He is thin and curly-haired, and holds a cigarette between his fingertips.
‘What you doing, wandering around out here at this hour, ma’am?’
‘Oh,’ says Gladys, trying to sound flippant, ‘just taking me some air, I guess!’
Glancing back, she can see the glow of blue light from her house. If this man means her harm, will Harold come running? Or has she gone too far for him to hear her scream?
‘You oughta be careful,’ says the man. ‘Can I offer you a ride someplace? Take you home, maybe?’
She judges him to be in his late thirties; younger than her. He’s unshaven but he looks clean enough. Bright-eyed, too, like the young Vernon.
‘Where you headed?’ she asks.
‘To work,’ he states. ‘Night shift. Don’t usually see nobody walking here, though.’
By the way his words slow as he leans across to get a better look at her, she suspects that he is beginning to realise who she is.
She giggles and removes her hands from her collar, so her coat slides open to the cool night. ‘Well,’ she says, smiling, ‘now you have.’
‘I sure have,’ he agrees, taking a drag on his cigarette. Then he thumps a hand on the dash. ‘Shoot! You ain’t out here looking for Elvis, are you, ma’am?’
Gladys freezes.
‘Like all them gals that line up outside those godawful gates down there?’ The man lets out a hoot of laughter. ‘You seen ’em? He’s got his own self on his own goddamn gates! I swear, you can take the boy out of Hicksville, but you sure can’t take Hicksville outta the boy. Still, maybe the army will knock some sense into him.’
Gladys draws her coat around her and drops her eyes.
The man shakes his head. ‘Naw. Course you ain’t. ’Scuse me, ma’am. I’m just foolin’.’
She tries to smile.
The man clears his throat. ‘Well, if you’re sure you gonna be all right …’
‘I live just over yonder,’ she says, pointing in the direction of the paddock.
‘Somebody waiting on you there?’
‘My husband.’
‘So long, then,’ he says, flicking his cigarette from the window. And he pulls away, leaving her to watch the red smears of the tail lights shrink to nothing.
When she arrives back at the mansion, Harold is standing between the open gates, shining his flashlight up and down the highway and exclaiming squeakily about all the terrible things that could have happened to his aunt.
Gladys pats him weakly on the arm. ‘Your aunt’s just a holy fool, is all.’
Then she takes off her shoes and limps up the driveway. With every step it’s as if another layer of skin has been stripped from her feet, and she looks back, almost expecting to see a trail of bloody footprints. But the driveway is clear, and Gladys continues her silent path back to the kitchen.
DIXIE: 1953–1954
1953
It’s late summer, and way too hot to wear the black bolero jacket he’s recently bought, so Elvis has settled for his thick dress pants and best red shirt for his visit to the Memphis Recording Service. With his guitar strapped to his back, he walks past the shining windows of the car showrooms towards the intersection of Union and Marshal avenues. Each time he’s imagined this moment – which is every day for the past six months – he has pictured himself in a similar outfit. In his mind, his hair is always precisely the right shape. But now it’s hot enough to melt the asphalt, let alone Vaseline, and a greasy lock keeps falling into his eye, along with dust from the cars cruising down the wide street.
He’s seen a picture of the owner of the Recording Service, Mr Sam Phillips, in the Memphis Press-Scimitar and has admired his classy suit and hairstyle. In that photo, Mr Phillips looked a bit like a dark-haired Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, but better than that. More manly.
Elvis likes the hit record that Mr Phillips brought out on his Sun label, the Prisonaires’ ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain’, but he’s got something different in mind for his recording. He wants something smoother. Something more Perry Como. Something he can do in a bow tie and imagine singing to a girl who will be much better-looking and more loyal than Betty McMahon. Something that will make grown men weep.
At the sight of his own reflection in the glass door of the studio, his spine weakens. He’s struck by the idea that Jesse is looking back at him, and feels suddenly exposed. He’s told nobody he is coming here today, not even Mama. Though he wanted to tell her, he couldn’t help imagining how unbearable it would be to admit that nothing had come of his walking through this door, and he’d deci
ded it was better to keep quiet than face her disappointment.
He’s actually a little shocked that his own feet have carried him all the way to number 706. Perhaps he’ll just duck in to Miss Taylor’s restaurant next door. In his pocket there’s more than enough for a soda and a hamburger. Now he’s graduated and is working five days a week at M. B. Parker’s machinists, it’s easy to have some left over.
He pushes the door open.
Taking off his guitar and grasping it by the neck, he stands on the chequered tiles and looks at the woman behind the desk.
‘Well, good afternoon!’ she says.
He nods, but can’t seem to remember how to speak.
To his relief, she rises from her chair and guides him in, shutting the door. When the air from her rotating fan hits him he gets a whiff of his own body: sweat, and maybe some oil from his car.
‘May I help you, young man?’ she asks.
With her golden hair and brightly patterned dress, she looks like a lady from one of his mama’s magazines. Her glasses have sparkles in the rims. Standing behind her typewriter, she beams.
‘I’m Miss Keisker,’ she says. ‘What can I do for you, son?’
He gestures vaguely to his guitar and manages to clear his throat. ‘I heard you could make a record here, ma’am.’
‘A two-sided acetate will be three dollars ninety-five plus tax. Is it for yourself?’
‘Ma’am?’
‘You want to do the recording yourself?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘When?’ She flicks through the ledger.
‘Uh …’
‘You want to do it right now?’
‘I guess.’
‘I think we can manage that.’ She glances at her watch. ‘I’ll just see if Mr Phillips has a moment. Wait here, please.’
First smoothing her dress, she opens the door at the back of the room and Elvis gets a glimpse of what’s beyond: a microphone, a piano, and empty space.
Seeing this, he doesn’t know if he can keep standing. While Miss Keisker is gone, he fights the urge to save himself the shame of it all and escape onto the bright street by reminding himself that he’d managed to sing at the Humes High Minstrel Show before graduating. The moment his homeroom teacher, Miss Scrivener, had called him out as the winner had made his whole school career worth enduring. When he’d told his mother, she’d shrieked with happiness.
Graceland Page 19
