by Gerald Duff
Tonto heard a bird call outside somewhere, and he was walking through the kitchen of the government reservation house to try to see what kind it was, a cardinal maybe or a mockingbird doing a good job of imitating a cardinal, but his mother told him to go to bed now, there still wasn’t anything to eat, and he did that, and felt the pillow against his face, rough and then smooth, and then nothing because he was asleep and he knew he needed that: a long, deep nap that would last him.
“Put that weapon down,” J.W. Ragsdale said to the man standing in the doorway with his hands up before his face, a Sig Sauer in the right one, turned so that the flat of it was toward the direction he was facing and the other hand palm out, clear enough in the light of the anteroom for J.W. to see its creases. How long’s his lifeline, J.W. wondered, and then, “I’m on a roll here, friend. Do it or it’s still rock and roll time in Memphis.”
“I’m through,” Coy Bridges said. “I’m putting it down. Don’t cut down on me, officer.”
“Are they all dead?” Jimbo Reynolds said, peeking from beneath the overturned chair. “Is that all of them?”
“Well, preacher,” J.W. said, moving to put cuffs on Coy Bridges who had laid his Sig Sauer on a side table, hit the floor face first, and put both hands behind his head. “I believe between me and Colorado and whoever offed the other shithead lying yonder on the floor, we’ve done all reached a state of peaceful equilibrium.”
“Equilibrium?” Tyrone Walker said from where he was standing on the next-to-top step of the staircase, weapon in hand. “You been reading again, haven’t you, J.W.? Have you joined some woman’s book club when I wasn’t looking?”
“You finally decided to come give me a hand once all the noise stopped, huh?” J.W. said. “I wish you would look at how nice this man is laying down yonder waiting to be restrained. I do believe he’s had experience in his chosen line of work.”
“I wanted to give you the opportunity to do something on your own, partner.” Tyrone said. “But I was waiting in the wings case you fucked up and fell off your tricycle. You needn’t’ve worried.”
“Praise Jesus for the victory,” Jimbo Reynolds said, standing almost all the way up now but for the wrist still fastened to the leg of the leather chair. “I prayed for the salvation of all of us, but I give Him the glory. Bless His sacred name.”
“Praise Sergeant Ragsdale’s nine is a better way to put it,” Tyrone Walker said. “That, and Randall Eugene McNeill’s .45.”
“Where is the young cowpuncher?” J.W. said. “I expect Ricky Nelson’s worried about him.”
“You didn’t see Ricky go by you on his way down the stairs?” Tyrone said. “He’s been down there carrying on a conversation with Randall Eugene for a couple of minutes now. Hear Colorado talking?”
“Ricky slipped by me, I reckon,” J.W. said, “while I was tending to mine and your business up here, Tyrone. I didn’t notice him, busy as I was in the middle of this Indian war.”
“Who’s Ricky Nelson?” Jimbo Reynolds said. “Who’s Colorado? Where’s that little colored boy that shot this poor fellow that’s still bleeding all over my wall here?”
“You don’t know much, do you, preacher?” Tyrone said.
“The preacher,” J.W. Ragsdale said, “don’t know shit.”
THIRTY
The 50th Anniversity of Elvis at the Sun Studio
They were coming now in large clots, three and four and five to the bunch, stepping in time to the music nearest them, some of them, while others listened to a tune originating farther off, matching their steps to that. A few made their way alone, heads held higher up than the ones bunched together, the music of the loners coming from their own portable CD players or in some cases from nowhere and anywhere, the nostrils of the loners flared as though they were smelling the vibrations in the air rather than hearing them in the late Monday afternoon funk of Memphis.
J.W. had pulled his chair around so that he was facing the front of the building rather than the expanse of Madison working its way into, within, through, of, and out of Overton Square. That way he could get away with not having to watch each and every freak tripping down the asphalt. People around him would let him know when to look, he figured, by their ooing and ahhing and carrying on, and he hated to feel like his head was on a swivel, anyway, subject to tracking everything passing within view. Restrict the view, he had learned somewhere back in Mississippi or on the Mekong or maybe it was here in Memphis sometime during the last fourteen years on the force. Restrict the view, narrow the sight, and improve the depth of what you’re focusing on.
“Why ain’t you looking at these fine young people, J.W.?” Tyrone Walker said. “Folks are going to start thinking you some kind of a misfit the way you’re sitting there.”
“I bet J.W.’s the kind of tourist when he gets to Destin he turns his back to the water and watches the pelicans flying over,” Nova Hebert said. “A contrarian’s what they call that. Marches to a different drummer.”
“I call it perversity,” Tyrone said. “Man trying so hard not to play the game he makes everybody think he is the game. He gets attention by acting like he hates and despises it.”
“Y’all leave J.W. alone,” Marvella Walker said. “I expect he’s trying to rest his nerves after that busy Sunday afternoon y’all had yesterday.”
“That, and get his head full of gin,” Tyrone said. “See how much he can hammer down while they got that price per drink down where it belongs as these evening shadows are a falling.”
“Tyrone wasn’t all that busy,” J.W. said, “yesterday in that big old house in the Nathan B. Forrest Estates. He wasn’t doing nothing but talking to that little bitty cowboy brother while I was doing all the heavy lifting.”
“Him and Ricky Nelson, you mean,” Tyrone said. “Don’t forget about the traveling man. I was with him, too.”
“Poor little fool,” Nova Hebert said.
“I was a fool, oh yeah,” Marvella sang. “Uh huh, I was a fool, I was a fool, oh yeah.”
“I thought any sister worth her salt wouldn’t have paid no attention to Ricky Nelson,” J.W. said. “You don’t find a boy nowhere whiter than he was.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Marvella said, stirring her red-colored drink with a swizzle stick bearing an image of the globe mounted with a large M. “Don’t get me started now, J.W., thinking about the way Ricky Nelson looked.”
“Speaking of which,” Tyrone said, “there he goes now, ain’t he?”
“Where?” J.W. said, twisting around in his chair. “Is he wearing that pink sport coat, with that flared up collar on the shirt underneath it?”
“He’s over yonder walking along with Buddy Holly,” Tyrone said. “See them holding hands?”
“Jesus Christ,” J. W. said. “Why do they have to mess it up like that? Neither one of them boys was gay, was they?”
“Rock and roll began as an androgynous statement, Mississippi Boy,” Nova Hebert said. “Everybody knows that now.”
“Elvis,” J.W. said. “He wasn’t one, that’s for shit sure.”
“What you call a man wears eyeshadow?” Marvella said. “Tarzan?”
“I’ve heard that before,” J.W. said. “I don’t believe a word of it. Where would an old boy from Mississippi buy eyeshadow?”
“Any drugstore,” Nova said. “Maybelline brand. That was the eye shade of choice back then.”
“What time they going to start playing it?” J.W. said, thinking to change the subject before the women got well and truly wound up.
“Not until six o’clock That’s when the Dewey Phillips Show used to come on. That’s the witching hour.” Nova looked down at her watch. “Nine more minutes.”
“And then it’ll be fifty years ago,” Marvella said. “I of course wasn’t born then.”
“Shit, Marvella,” J.W. said. “Neither me nor Tyrone was much more than babies then. How old do you think we are, anyway?”
“You as old as you act, J.W.,” Marvella sa
id. “That’s how old.”
“He’s about sixty-five then,” Tyrone said. “J.W. is. Where is that man with the drinks? Can’t he tell I’m thirsty?”
“That little boy,” Marvella said, “The rest of them I couldn’t care less about. I can’t help but keep thinking about him, though. His cowboy clothes and all. Boots. Everything all nice and new. His little hat.”
“Do you suppose they’ll let him wear his cowboy duds inside?” Nova said. “Looks like it wouldn’t hurt anything to let him do that.”
“If he’s in Central State they won’t care what he wears,” Tyrone said. “You got to cater to psychos and nuts of every description to keep them calmed down some in that kind of institution. You get the right costume on one of them suckers, and lot of times he’ll get just as gentle as a broke horse.”
“Yeah,” J.W. said. “Tyrone’s right. See, a criminally insane crazy man, he just lives in his head. So anything you can do to accommodate that helps to keep him quiet.”
“My,” Marvella said. “Aren’t you just impressed and amazed about how much these two Memphis detectives know about psychology, Nova? All these terms and everything. Goodness sakes.”
“I don’t know much about it from books,” J.W. said, swung back around to face the building again, the crowd of paraders swelling behind him. “But I know what makes a nut tick. I seen enough of them.”
“You say if they put him in Central State, Tyrone,” Nova Hebert said. “They wouldn’t do anything else with him, would they? He’s obviously deeply disturbed and going to stay that way.”
“There’s disturbed, and there’s disturbed,” Tyrone Walker said. “See, if you don’t act on your desires to eat your fellow man or consort with chickens or act like a cowboy just come to town with his sixguns a blazing, the law in Tennessee don’t give a damn what you do. But if you start acting out your fantasies, killing old ladies and shooting people through the aorta and stuff like that, the State of Tennessee won’t cut you much slack for being nuts. They’ll slap your ass in a real prison where you ain’t allowed to go western in your wardrobe.”
“I predict Brushy Mountain and a nice set of matching gray pants and shirts for Randall Eugene McNeill,” J.W. said. “It’s a whole lot simpler to put him there than worrying about whether he meets the entrance requirements for Central State over yonder in Nashville. He’ll have company wherever he ends up, though. The traveling man ain’t about to desert Randall Eugene.”
“I think I’m going to call him Colorado,” Nova said. “Not Randall Eugene McNeill. No matter what school he gets into. That’s the name he wants and the one he’s earned.”
“Look out yonder,” Marvella said, “talking about earning a name. If that ain’t Elvis Presley, I’ll ride a motorcycle down this sidewalk backwards.”
Everybody turned to look at where Marvella was pointing, J.W. rotating his chair all the way around to see. It was worth the trouble, he decided as soon as he saw the King surrounded by four attendants dressed all in black as they moved in step down Madison. The man at the center was an older Elvis, not yet gone completely to flesh, his eyes not covered by shades, no more than two rings per hand, and no sequins on the jumpsuit. In J.W.’s estimation, the Elvis moving before them was fixed in time just the wrong side of the date when the King had done the Singer Special attired in black leather and a deep tan, still alive from the neck down and unable to conceal that fact from the world.
“Who is that one?” Nova said. “Hot damn, he looks just like him. Y’all ever seen him before?”
“Yes, I have,” J.W. said. “That there is Lance Lee, the best impersonator there ever was. I’m glad to see he’s still around.”
“Long as there’s virtue in hair dye and girdles, I expect we’ll keep on seeing him,” Tyrone said.
“Naw,” J.W. said. “He’s a legend, Lance Lee is. He’ll drop out of sight for two or three years at a time and then show up at something like this thing in Memphis today. Nobody knows where he’s been staying in between. It’s like he’s been in a time capsule, Lance Lee has.”
“A Global Moment in Time,” Marvella said. “That’s what we’re witnessing, officers.”
“You got that right,” J.W. said, and then holding his hand up as though to quiet the multitudes, “Listen. It’s starting up.”
From every loud speaker on Madison Avenue in Midtown Memphis, from every radio and TV station in Memphis and the MidSouth, from every sound system in every car on every street, from the fringes of each crowd of parading impersonators of rock and roll singers to the middle of the space where they lived, truly and surely in their heads, came the first note of the tune that started it. All worshippers fell silent and all listened, and the nineteen-year-old truckdriver sang it in Memphis again, the way he did fifty years ago, from beginning to end, from the inside out, and the outside in.
“Damn,” J.W. Ragsdale said as he sat in Memphis, Tennessee, whiskey working in him like a blessing on July the fifth, 2004, a global moment in time. “That’s all right, mama, y’all. Let’s have a drink.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gerald Duff is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and has published 19 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry and non-fiction. His stories have been cited in the Best American Short Fiction, the Pushcart Prizes, and the Editors’ Choice: The Best American Fiction. He’s won the Cohen Award for Fiction, the Philosophical Society of Texas Literary Award, and the Silver Medal for Fiction from the Independent Publishers Association. Duff grew up in two parts of Texas: the petro-chemical area of the Gulf Coast, and the pine barrens of Deep East Texas, which made for two-mindedness and a bifurcated view of the world, as he demonstrates in his fiction. His characters are deeply rooted both in the past and in the present, and they struggle fiercely and comically in a quest to achieve escape velocity from places which are not their homes. He has has worked as a hand in the oil fields and the cotton fields, as a janitor, a TV camera man, a professor of English, a college dean, and as a bit actor in television drama. He has made up stories all his life and written wherever he’s been. He’s still doing that.
