by Rick Bass
The brassy twist of the cap, its first little squeaky sound. The splash, the short gurgle. The immense feeling of relief spilling from him as his homecoming filled the cabin. As if he had traveled a long way to make it back to them, and back to that bottle, and had arrived just in time, as darkness fell, and that it had saved him.
GRACELAND
SHE REMEMBERS THE first time she heard him referred to as the King. It caught her by surprise, but she didn't give it much thought one way or the other. She didn't think it would stick, thought it was just a nickname some local station used for him. She thought it was overreaching, a parody of ambition. Weren't they all, despite their surprising successes, still just local musicians traveling from one small town to the next, and occasionally getting to play a larger venue, like the Opry?
None of the Browns had a clue. They were like racehorses with blinders, thundering down the dirt track. There was a jockey lashing them and the horses were dimly aware that there were people in the stands, but they thought nothing of where the track was going—whether it was straightening or circling in a loop—or of the consequences of their efforts and accomplishments. They knew only that there was some flyweight jockey on their back, urging them on, directing them to do that which they already loved doing.
The flyweight rider therefore almost, but not quite, unnecessary, irrelevant. What rider? The horse in its blinders cannot see. The horse out on the track feels only the other horses falling back in groups of ones and twos, then clumps of threes and fours. Knows nothing of history, or of any arc beyond the moment of the next stride.
The promoters of Graceland hold a major festival each August to commemorate his untimely death. They celebrate everything about him, from the sweet country boy he was to the bloated extrapolation of insatiable American appetite and surface showmanship that he became. His worshipers prowl the grounds of Graceland with metal detectors that they've smuggled in before being accosted by security guards. They flock through in their pilgrimage, telling stories of connections in which they've participated—a toy stuffed animal signed by him, a comb he was alleged to have used once. As time marches on, the list of hallowed associates grows ever shorter, even as the pilgrims' zealotry grows more intense with the accruing distance. As if seeking blindly in their annual congregation to reassemble, like astronomical nebulae, enough of the strange burning to resurrect even a glimmer of what was. Of what he carried within him always, and of what he made them feel.
To such sojourners, anything he touched is sacred, and any person he touched, or who touched him, hallowed. They brought his parents out regularly while they were living and bombarded them with the most unthinkable questions, shoved to the front of the line to show them windowpanes in which the pilgrim thought she sometimes saw the King's profile. Asking Elvis's old daddy for a lock of his hair, a fingernail. As the years pass by, the organizers have invited his dentist—"Shake the hand that filled Elvis's cavities!"—to answer questions about the King's oral hygiene, what his tonsils looked like.
At these conventions, no small number of the attendees wander the grounds dressed like Elvis, or thinking that they are dressed like him. Some of them miss the mark by quite a bit, while the others represent him fairly accurately at all the different stages of his life. There are baby Elvises in strollers, clad in dark glasses, with grease-blackened hair. It's a clan, a cult willing to drink whatever Kool-Aid is put before them, but it's an audience, it's worship and acclaim, even if slightly indirect, and each year when the promoters invite the Browns, Maxine says yes, in the years she's well enough to make the journey.
Jim Ed is always working, and Bonnie doesn't dare go—among the faithful who even know about her early romance, there are many who believe that when she ended their relationship, she started him on his spiral—but Maxine always goes when she's able.
The promoters promise to set up a little booth where Maxine can sit and sell her CDs and sign autographs. Maxine has learned over the years to bring a pillow to sit on, padding the folding metal chair. She smiles, grimaces at the sillier questions, tries to answer the ones she can—tries to interject a little about herself, and her career, and that of her brother and sister, but only rarely gets the chance for that. With her diminished hearing, she often can't quite make out what they're saying to her, and so only nods politely and signs, in careful, shaky, spidery scrawl, her full name, Maxine Brown—she dropped the Russell after the divorce—on whatever odd package or item they are shoving across the table at her. Usually an old album of his, but often anything—a tie, a gas receipt, the back of a hand. They must have contact, even if they don't know what it is they're contacting. They are lost, each and every one of them, and for a short while, she feels almost motherly toward them; it makes her feel considerably better, recognizing how lost they are, makes her feel as if she herself is not.
Napkins are the worst. No matter how careful she is, the pen always catches and tears the paper, leaves a blotted, unsatisfactory mess; though still they shove them at her, wanting to accumulate and gather anything and everything, starving and lonely and long adrift.
Each year they send for her in a limousine, which thrills her. She spends days, weeks, beforehand, anticipating, trying on different outfits, experimenting with different makeup, and humming, crooning, keeping her voice supple, in case someone should ask her to sing an impromptu song. The organizers will put her up in a garish suite: a king-size four-poster bed with velour curtains, cloying potpourri, Graceland ashtrays, photographs and velvet paintings adorning the walls, and shag carpet thick enough to lose a golf ball in.
It's the best time of year for her, August. She loves the vile and mismatched tasteless opulence of the hotel room—the Negro waiters from room service, the giant television screen, the air conditioner set on fifty-six degrees while outside the temperature exceeds a muggy one hundred degrees. She even loves sitting in the metal folding chair at her little card table, smiling brightly at the brief gawking of passing-by strangers, a few of whom stop to visit.
But best of all, she loves the ride in the long black limousine. She sits way in the back, all dressed up, and chats through the speakerphone with whichever affable chauffeur they have sent, telling him her life story while he listens with interest. Adjusting the air conditioner in the plush leather seat, and hurtling down the road, the big shark of a car, smooth and powerful, piloted by the elegant uniformed driver in utter control of the road, passing one ailing car after another on the too short drive up to Graceland: the fender-sprung sputtering old truck in front of them loaded down with green twisted firewood or piled high with the bric-a-brac of moving day, residue of a divorce sale or possibly a family still barely intact but seeking a more affordable rent; the bald-tired Bel Air or Impala muffler-dragging and low-riding with death spirals of blue-gray smoke blatting from behind; and cane poles lashed to the roof, hunter-gatherers setting out in search of the afternoon's sustenance.
Passing the fields and farms, the red clay visible like a scab on slopes of land that have been logged too hard, or grazed too hard, or farmed too hard and are now slipping away into gullies of erosion, the signature of poverty, of not enough...
Past the weathered farmhouses, in the yards of which lie scattered bicycles and tricycles, the toys from multiple generations of various offspring and relatives, and the trailers up on cinder blocks, sometimes attached to the old house and other times set off at some distance, inescapable evidence of the economic siege that had beset a family or clan for so long that the defeat and desperation is in their every habit, as if twined now into their DNA—the besieged inhabitants of such farms so at the edge, or so at the end, that they no longer even bother to buy lottery tickets, no longer even drink or smoke, for there is no money for any of it, only desperation. The household so poor and so common that the electricity has long ago been cut off, looping wires hanging in various stages of disassembly from leaning creosote-soaked wooden poles that will one day be cut up for firewood, and the dishwater having to be
heated on a woodstove, even in summer.
And from the porch of more than one such encampment, one of the occupants, usually a woman, coming out onto the porch to toss out a tray of soapy gray dishwater, not looking up until the dishwater is already in the air, sailing in flashing heliograph-spray through August heat-haze toward the hard-packed, lifeless red clay shell of a yard that has accepted a thousand or ten thousand other such hurlings.
Steam rising from the shifting tossed rope of gray water, and steam then from the hardpan clay itself as the water lands—steam rising even in August, as if some volcanic activity, some nearing geothermal yearning, is stirring in that beleaguered and defeated yard. The woman only then lifting her head, mid-sling, to witness the long black car powering north, with the woman pausing to stare for a moment at the distant sight not so much of celebrity or even power but of utter wealth—staring at the limousine impassively, with neither longing nor scorn, only the mask of impassivity, as if there is now no setback or humiliation, no misfortune or obstacle, that can affect her disposition one way or the other, there is only the next chore to tend to, and this life, this shortening life, to hurry up and finish...
And what does Maxine feel, passing such farmlands? Does she feel the centripetal pull—the first twenty-one years of her life lived that way, the life she escaped, the foundation of all that was to come later, both the glory and the despair—or does she feel nothing at all, only the satisfaction of great luck? Perhaps she falls silent in her conversation with the driver for a while. Perhaps she considers for a moment that in such scenes she is looking at herself across time—not at the woman she likely would have become, but in some way the woman she still is, unseen and unknown and likewise waiting for the last day on the calendar. As if nothing has happened, as if she was once that dishwater woman and has always been, and must always be.
No. She clears her throat, just to feel the old familiar tingle of voice being prepared. She could still sing if she had to. The voice will never leave her. She is ensconced in the cool glide of the limousine, the thick tinted glass protecting her from the hard scorch of the countryside. This is how things are supposed to be: the world has corrected itself, she is royalty, she was chosen for royalty, and while it's a shame the dishwater woman has to suffer and know unhappiness and, perhaps worse, the anonymity of time hurtling past, time that the dishwater woman can in no way influence, Maxine, too, has suffered and known unhappiness, and now, finally, it's time for such things to end. Now, at last.
Pulling into Memphis, then, her far too brief ride in the lap of luxury nearing its end. Through the outlying industrial wastelands, and roads as ragged as a war zone. Why is the driver taking her this way? Isn't there a more elegant routing, a smoother path?
Onward, and back out into the country. Beads of condensation trickling down her window, so great is the difference between her ride and the terrific heat outside. Passing through the gates of her dead friend's manor—cars everywhere, glinting in the heat—she leans forward with the quick hit of anticipation—she almost imagines that she might see him again—and despite the heat, she cracks the window an inch to let in the true, untinted light and to better taste the real air of the experience, the summer-hot air of the pilgrims who once worshiped him and still do, or who never did but now do. This is what I wanted, she thinks. This is what I deserve. There was not a shred of difference between them, and her success came first. Why have things turned out this way, and might the inequity yet be salvaged or correlated?
Giddy as a teenager, she takes in all the heat and light through that inch-crack of window, and the sweet scent of new-mown grass in summer heat, all the lawns manicured in preparation for the throngs.
And she sees it, then, Graceland itself, no less than the Taj Mahal. The American Taj Mahal.
For two days and two nights, she imagines she is royalty. Because she and only two others—Bonnie and Jim Ed—know that she is the source and not the echo or shadow of her time. That it was Elvis and all the others whose voices splintered from hers, rather than the other way around—it is easy for her to bask in the hoopla and imagine that more of it is about her than is now really the case.
Some Augusts she's too beaten down to travel, despite it being the highlight of her year; or she is recovering from one surgery or another. In the years she can't go, can't make the short journey, the folks at Graceland are kind to her; they send her flowers and a nice handwritten note saying that everyone is asking about her, and that they all hope she can make it next year, and that they'll be waiting for her. There's always next year, they say. We'll look forward to next time.
HER NEW FAMILY
SHE WON'T SPEAK poorly of Tommy, or of Floyd, despite the disappointments they caused her—the disappointments she allowed them to cause her. As ever, she carries what she perceives as an unfair load, in part because it is all she knows; she is so unaccustomed to being without burden that she's more comfortable with burden's presence than its absence. And having succumbed for long years to their same disease, she has no stomach for judging Floyd or Tommy.
She was lucky, she thinks. She got out—even if with so many scars—while they did not. They loved her imperfectly, and she thinks that was better than nothing.
In Tommy's case, she allows she might have been wrong about that.
He was unfaithful and irresponsible, had been led to believe over the course of his young life, by the way people turned to notice him when he entered a room, that he was special, and deserving therefore of special rules.
They had been married less than a year when she found out for the first time that, with spectacular unoriginality, he was involved with his secretary. She can only shake her head now at the space that separates her from who she was then and who she is now. She found one of the secretary's notes to him tucked in his coat pocket, and confronted Tommy, not so much with anger as disbelief and confusion. It wasn't so much that she didn't understand men could be that way as instead her surprise that her will alone was not enough to control the situation.
Tommy claimed the relationship was left over from before he knew Maxine, that he would break it off, that he felt sorry for the secretary, that Maxine was the love of his life, that he was a fool, that he would never do anything like that again—and she believed him, forgave him, and was surprised by a vulnerability, a worry, she had not known she possessed.
The anxiety began to spread through her rapidly, like an illness, and the times she had to go back out on the road became even more stressful. She didn't tell Birdie or Bonnie, and though she tried to shove the concerns down into some nether compartment, she had trouble keeping them there. Maybe it will be a one-time thing, she told herself, and, in her more worried moments, Maybe I can be better, maybe I can do better. Maybe I can change him. Almost surreptitiously, she studied how Bonnie and Elvis were together, lighthearted. She tried to be that way, but it felt forced.
It was only a month after discovering Tommy's first indiscretion that she found out she was pregnant. Certain that this would help turn him back toward her, she could not have been more wrong. Before their first child, Tommy, was born, Maxine discovered two other incidents, one reported to her directly by the wife of the minister at the church she had sometimes attended as a child, and discovering the other on her own when she came back from a tour days earlier than planned—her pregnancy showing hugely by that point—and found the woman asleep in her home at ten in the morning. Maxine had pulled the woman out of bed and began kicking at her and pulling her hair, intent on killing her—if she had had a weapon in her hands at the time, she would have—and chased the woman from her house and into the yard.
Maxine left Tommy after that, went back to live with Birdie and Floyd without explaining why, but after the birth, she moved back in with him. Tommy made some promises, and was pleased with the baby.
"Scarlet Ribbons" came next, followed by "I'm in Heaven." It was a good year, and she eased back out onto the road. We married too young, she told herself, but
we'll get through this. Something was hardening within her, but that was all right; in that hardening, it felt like strength, even if the feeling did seem to lack a certain flexibility.
The baby was a joy, someone different every time she returned home.
The second child, Alicia, saved her life. Knowing she was pregnant again, though seized with headaches and back pain that had not been present the first time, Maxine went to her doctor, who discovered a fast-growing tumor along her spine; soon enough it would have cut off blood flow and sensation. They didn't have much money by that point—Tommy had started going to the dog races in Hot Springs—and Maxine knew that if she hadn't been pregnant, she probably would have put off going to the doctor for weeks or even months.
The doctor said she had gotten in to see him just in time; that it had been a matter of days.
"Teen-Ex" and "The Whiffenpoof Song": it didn't feel like a trap, this narrowing into a weir from which there would be no escape. There was time for both; as long as Tommy did his part, there was time for it all. The divorce rate in the country at that time was around 5 percent; she would break trail on a lot of things, but not that. If Birdie could stay with Floyd, she could hang in there a little longer with Tommy, who, to the best of her knowledge, had been good then for two or three months in a row.
"Lonely Little Robin" and "Ground Hog": more number ones. The anticipation—the hunger—while out on the road, of wanting to return home to her babies, and then, as they started to grow, her children, was a sweet and delicious and haunting thing. In her imagination, she would be welcomed back by a loving and attentive husband, though the reality upon her return was always something less, with fights and accusations and, worst of all, cold distances. There was anything but lightheartedness.
