“The concert’s over tonight, I’m gone. I’ve thought about this a lot the last couple of weeks. I mean, I thought should I maybe skip coming here altogether—hitch to Louisville, where the Dead go next? But Emmett, this guy I hang out with, he goes, ‘Mellow out, man. What happens, happens.’ I figured, okay, I wouldn’t call you, but if you found me, fine—you know, like it was meant to be.” He grins and wiggles his eyebrows. “Maybe I should’ve skipped it, though. I mean, if I’d known you’d gotten so goddamn touchy—”
“I’m not touchy,” I say. “I’ve been through a lot, and I’m sick and tired of worrying about everybody, okay? I mean, are you going to do this forever? Roam around with the Dead? You look like shit, Brady. I bet those cheeseburgers were the first real food you’ve eaten for days.”
He cracks up. “Mr. Mom! The Jax I know and love.” He jumps up, does a little dance, nearly knocking down an old man who’s carrying a handful of napkins to his wife. “Sorry, sir,” he says. “Really.”
The old man nods and goes on.
“See? I’m still the swell guy I always was.” He grabs my shoulder, pulls me out of the booth. “Come on, Kemo Sabe,” he says. “Let’s blow. Time to boogie.”
Driving back to Deer Creek, neither of us speaks. But Brady turns the stereo on loud the way he used to, and if I block out reality, it’s like the two of us are just out cruising on a summer night, the way we used to be.
forty–six
The band appears; the crowd shouts its welcome. But I’ve been to Dead concerts with my Dad before, so I’m not surprised when that’s the last bit of attention anyone pays them. “The Deadheads aren’t really into the music,” he always said. “They’re into how music is all there is.”
Now, with Brady, I understand for the first time what Dad meant. The minute the music starts, he’s dancing, oblivious. Alone, two-by-two, in groups. Bodies sway. Hair and smoke seem like the same thing. Arms reach like tentacles toward the light. Near the end, a huge grinning skeleton appears onstage. Bone white, puppetlike, it dances, too—its rickety limbs flailing.
I’m totally wiped out when it’s over. Drenched with sweat. I haven’t stopped for one second. I didn’t dare take the chance of losing Brady, who danced like a dervish the whole time, spinning and wheeling dangerously out of sight. He’s on something. His eyes are dilated; his speech slurs as we make our way outside. Acid, probably. I never saw it, but there were plenty of times I saw his hands touch other hands, plenty of times he turned away from me and could have tucked a tab under his tongue. Now he stumbles, witless, beside me through the parking lot.
I could just let him go. I could say, “Great to see you, man. Keep in touch,” and let him drift back to the Dead camp with the others. But I can’t do it. I keep thinking, you let Stephanie go, and look what happened. I’m afraid for Brady. He’s a mess; there’s not much left of the person I knew. But maybe if I stay with him, I can save him. Maybe I can get him home, get him someplace where he can get help. He’s been so much a part of my life, I have to try.
“I’m starving,” I say, when we get to the bus. “Want to go for pizza?”
“Groovy,” he says. “Excellent plan.”
I open the door of my bus, and wasted as he is, Brady climbs in without a glitch. That makes me feel a little hopeful. He’s been gone a long time, but not long enough for his body to forget a move it made countless times before he left. Maybe he’ll remember other things, too, once I get him away. Maybe this life, his real life, will start to seem familiar to him.
He leans back, closes his eyes, blissful, like an old man taking a nap. “Far out,” he murmurs from time to time.
I want to shake him and say, “I know, the cosmos. It’s cliché, man. God in swirling colors, all the answers to life’s questions in the dripping sky.”
I just drive north. When I exit from the interstate about an hour and a half later, Brady sits straight up, looks out the window at a cornfield. “Where are we, man?” he says.
“Huntington.”
“Huntington? What? I can’t go to Huntington, Jax.”
I have to laugh. The way he says it, you’d think I’d told him we’d just arrived in the darkest pit of hell. “You’re already here,” I say. “Congratulations. You, Brady Burton, have won a night in beautiful Huntington, Indiana. Second prize is a night in Huntington and a visit to the Dan Quayle Museum—”
“Very funny” he says. “Take me back. My ride won’t wait all night for me. What time is it, anyway?”
“One,” I say.
For a second, I think he’s going to reach over and hit me. Instead, he slams his fist against the dashboard. “Goddamn you, Jax. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to.” He starts to open the car door, even though we’re moving. I swerve and stop at the side of the road.
“Look,” I say. “There’s a Denny’s over there. Aren’t you hungry?”
Brady shrugs. “I’m going back.”
“Yeah, okay,” I lie. “I’ll drive you to Louisville myself if your ride is gone when we get back. But I’ve got to get some coffee first; I’m fried.”
“Well, I’ve got to take a leak,” he says. “I guess we might as well stop.”
He hits the john the minute we get to the restaurant. When he comes out and sees me on the phone, he says, “You’re not talking to Layla, are you? You’re not deluded enough to think you can set up some kind of scene from This Is Your Life?”
“Give me a break,” I say. “I’m talking to Ted, my stepdad. Just get us a table, okay? I’ll be right there.”
“Jackson?” Ted says.
I continue with the convoluted story of how I ended up where I am.
“Huntington?” Ted says, just like Brady did.
“I know it sounds stupid. But Brady was really wasted after the concert, so I just put him in the bus and drove in the opposite direction of where the Dead were going.”
“He’s still wasted?”
“He’s okay. Right now, he’s pissed. So I told him I’d drive him to Louisville—that’s where the Dead play next. But I don’t know; I still might be able to talk him into coming home with me.”
“Well, you be careful, Jackson,” Ted says. “Listen, you know there’s a good chance you won’t be able to get Brady to do what you want him to do, don’t you? Some people, well—if you can’t get him to go home, it’s not your fault.”
“I know,” I say. “Hey, I’ve got to go—”
“Gotcha,” he says. “Just take care, will you?”
I slide into the booth across from Brady, who’s got the menu propped up in front of him. He lowers it and grins at me. “You’ll drive me to Louisville?” he says. “No lie?”
I nod.
“Okay, let’s stay up all night then. After we chow down, let’s go to Steph’s grave.”
We order a whole tableful of food. Eggs, ham, pancakes, biscuits. We’re the only people in the restaurant, and Brady entertains the waitresses, telling them about traveling with the Dead. When he wipes the last plate clean with his toast and says, “The Dead don’t get much to eat, you know,” they laugh and bring him an extra stack of pancakes on the house.
It’s past two when we leave. I drive the speed limit back to Indy, in spite of the fact that he harasses me about being a good citizen.
“Good citizen, shit,” I say finally. “If I get arrested again, my ass is grass.”
“Grass!” Brady raises his index finger. “Excellent concept, dude.” He produces a joint from his back pocket.
“Don’t do it, man,” I say. “If we get stopped—”
But he just laughs at me, tokes up, and zones out. He’s not as out of it as I think, though, because the second I turn onto Sixty-Second Street, toward home, he says, “This isn’t the way to Crown Hill.”
“It’s locked at nig
ht,” I say. “So let’s just go to my house and crash. We’ll go first thing in the morning. Then I’ll drive you—”
“No way,” he says. “Tonight.”
“I told you, it’s locked, man.”
“Then we go through the fence, wimp. She’d like that anyhow. Us breaking in to see her. I know a place—”
“Now?” I ask. “What place?”
“Dude, I just know one, okay? I’ll show you.”
We cruise the side streets until Brady finds a section of fence where the iron poles are bent, but once inside, I can’t get my bearings. I have no idea how to find Steph’s grave. I was only there once, the day of the funeral. It’s somewhere behind the chapel; I remember that. But when Brady and I find the chapel, I don’t know which of the different roads leading away from it to take. The place is huge; I read once that there are thirty-some miles of roads winding through it. Now they swirl out like black ribbons from where we stand. The graves glisten white. The usual rectangular markers, crosses, angels. Marble tree trunks—their carved ivy mingling with the real ivy climbing round them. Those tombs that look like little houses.
I should have come before now. I should have brought flowers for her grave; she would’ve liked that. But I was afraid to come, afraid of remembering how Steph looked in the casket, afraid the headstone with her name on it would bring some shock of realization: it’s Steph beneath me, in the dark, alone. So I stayed away.
I follow Brady, who’s roaming among the graves, reading the names aloud. We come to one huge, pillared monument that has a bronze statue of a woman, prostrate on the steps. Brady throws himself on it as if to hump her, and I’m glad I can’t remember where Steph’s grave is. Even if I could remember now, I wouldn’t take Brady to it. I don’t want to know what he’d do there.
“Maybe we should go,” I say. “There’s no way we’re going to find the grave tonight.”
“She’s here someplace,” Brady says. “What’s the difference where? She’s dead now. She knows everything. She knows we’re here, man. We don’t have to actually find her.”
I shiver to think this might be true. I feel the presence of all the finished lives around me, watching me with something more powerful than eyes, something that lets them see inside me, and it scares and shames me.
“Brady, let’s go,” I say. “Come on. We shouldn’t be here.”
But he takes off up the hill, and it seems to me that, having committed myself to getting him through this night, I have to follow. I know where he’s going. Silently, staying in the shadows, we climb to the top to the marble pillars that mark the grave of James Whitcomb Riley. Once there, I feel the tight band around my heart ease a little. It’s the highest place in the city, and I can look out and see cars and roads and houses. In the distance, I see the downtown skyscrapers, utterly real.
“Awesome view,” Brady says. “What a city!” Then he leaps onto the steps of the monument and starts reciting “The Raggedy Man.”
“Remember?” he says. “Mrs. Everly made us all stand right here and say it together that time? Man, she was practically bawling before it was all over. All us sweet little fourth graders spouting Riley’s poem. She thought he was a god.”
“Mrs. Blue says he’s terrible,” I say. “An embarrassment to real poets.”
Brady shrugs. “Mrs. Blue takes it all too seriously, if you ask me. What’s the big deal? Poems. Hey, James must’ve done something right to get this megagrave. It’s what I want someday. A monument. With one of those, you know—” He waves his hands around, as if he could catch the word he wants. “What do they call it when they carve in what a great guy you were before you croaked?”
“Epitaph.”
“Yeah,” Brady says. “One of those. Did they put one on Steph’s grave?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I think just her name and her birthday and when she died.”
“Bummer,” Brady says. “That’s not right. There ought to be something more than that. Just because she didn’t win the Nobel Prize or anything. They could’ve just put something nice there, something she’d have liked. Maybe from the Beatles or something. Or Simon and Garfunkel. She liked them.”
In my head I hear a strain of that song about the lovers riding on the bus: “Kathy, I’m lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping—”
And it all floods back to me, the two of us this spring as lost as the people in that song. But Brady’s already gone off on another track—about how hopeless Stephanie was. How, really, she’s better off dead. She couldn’t even fuck up right.
“I used to tell her, ‘Steph, you get too bent out of shape about this shit. You want an instant reaction. If you really want to make them crazy, you have to sustain fucking up. You have to fuck up over the long run.’ You know what I mean, Jax?”
It’s dark. I guess he can’t see me well enough to see I have no clue what he’s talking about.
“I have a theory about this,” he says, pompous as a teacher. “Take Jim Morrison, man. The ultimate fuckup, you think. I know this guy who went to his grave in Paris. It’s a mecca for fuckups, he said. Every fuckup in the world wants to go to Jim’s grave. But I say Morrison was an amateur. He got to twenty-seven. Big deal. My theory is you haven’t really fucked up until there’s no way you can possibly redeem yourself. You catch my drift?”
My face must be blank because Brady goes on as if he’s speaking to a retarded person. “Morrison was twenty-seven, Jax. A baby. Joplin, Hendrix. Babies. Mama Cass, stoned, choking on a goddamn ham sandwich. Belushi, even. Babies, all of them. But let’s talk about Elvis! Elvis made it to forty-two, a fat, pill-popping slob. A spoiled brat. ‘Bring me girls! Bring me cheeseburgers!’ This guy made fucking up an art form. And the beauty of it is, he didn’t even know he was fucking up. He didn’t even try. It came natural to him! He was the king, all right! Of fucking up. Yeah, King Fuckup.” Brady laughs. “You know what we ought to do, Jax? We ought to go there.”
“Where?” I say.
“Graceland. Graceland. The Dead go to Memphis next, after Louisville. And today’s the fifteenth, right?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Barely. So?”
Brady gets this look on his face like he’s just seen God. “Oh, man,” he says, sounding like Elvis himself. “Karma! Synchronicity! This is so cool. August sixteenth is the day he died. Every year the fans go back, and the whole night of the fifteenth, tonight, there’s a vigil. Let’s go, Jax. You always wanted to go to Graceland. You always said your old man would take you. But who needs him? Let’s do it ourselves.”
“Brady … ” I say.
“Come on, come on—one last road trip. The ultimate road trip. What do you say? You’re going to college; I’m going back to the Dead. But first let’s do Graceland together, Jax. One last, unforgettable act.”
forty–seven
It was stupid to let Brady talk me into going. By the time we get to Louisville, I’m half inclined to say I’ve changed my mind—drop him off wherever the Dead are playing tonight and head home, cut my losses. But I know Brady. I’d drive all the way to the place and he’d sit there, his arms folded across his chest, refusing to budge. Once he’s made up his mind about something, there’s no changing it. We’re going to Graceland. That’s that.
When we stop for gas, I call Ted’s office to tell him where I am and where we’re headed.
“Yeah, Graceland,” I repeat. “To Memphis. Brady wants to. There’s some kind of big deal there because it’s the anniversary of Elvis’ death, and we’re going to check it out.”
“Elvis? Jackson—”
“I know it’s weird. But just tell Mom I’m fine, will you? Tell her not to tell Layla I’m with Brady. It’ll only upset her.”
“Okay,” he says. “Listen, you’ll need money, won’t you? Take that MasterCard I gave you to use in an emergency and get some
cash. Almost any bank will take it. Get what you need.” He laughs. “And get me a souvenir. Be careful, though, Jackson. Really. Keep us posted.”
As we pull away from the gas station, Brady lifts up his shirt and takes two packages of peanut-butter crackers from the waistband of his jeans. “Food for the poor.”
“Did you steal those?” I ask.
His hand holding a cracker freezes halfway to his mouth. “Oh, man!” He smacks his forehead with his other hand. “I forgot. Right, it’s a capitalistic society. We work for food. I guess we should take them back.
“Loosen up, Jax,” he says when I don’t laugh.
“Loosen up, shit,” I say. “You want to end up in jail, fine. But leave me out of it.” I make him wait in the bus while I go into the bank. I put fifty bucks in my wallet, fifty in the front pocket of my jeans. We drive through McDonald’s and get some Egg McMuffins, then head back to the interstate.
Brady seems completely unaffected by the fact we haven’t slept, but by noon, my eyeballs are scratchy, my head hurts. The lane markers on the highway start to blur. I’ll have an accident if I keep on, so I let him take over, and I crawl into the backseat, expecting the worst. But, at least until I drift off to sleep, Brady drives like a sensible human being. The last thing I remember is the click of a tape going into the tape deck. Brady singing along with R.E.M.
When I wake up, we’re not dead or in jail.
“Hey, we’re bouncing into Graceland,” Brady says, stopping at a red light. “I’m a weird-magnet, man. I drive into Memphis with no idea where I’m going, and here I am.”
Sure enough, I sit up and there’s Graceland, framed by my window. The house is big, but it’s no Hollywood mansion. Just a nice two-story stone house with white pillars. There’s a huge front yard, lots of trees, a long winding driveway. The stone wall has a set of iron gates made to look like an open music book.
We pull into the parking lot behind the Graceland Welcome Center with its strip mall full of souvenir shops. Brady and I pick one and go in. He’s convinced we have to outfit ourselves so people will think we’re real fans. Before we’re finished, we’ve charged a boatload of stuff on the credit card. Black T-shirts with “Elvis” written on them in silver, aviator sunglasses with thick silver rims—the kind Elvis used to wear—buttons with a bolt of lightning and the letters “TCB” on them.
Wish You Were Here Page 26
