Last Ride to Graceland (3 page)

Now the wait song is “Jailhouse Rock.” I listen through three whole choruses before a new voice comes on the line. A man. Older sounding.

“Whatcha got?” he says.

Whatcha got. Not the warmest of greetings. The lady might not have believed me, but she at least had that singsongy politeness that people who work in tourist destinations all seem to have.

“What I have is a 1973 Stutz Blackhawk,” I tell him, and my voice starts shaking like I'm about to cry. “A black coupe. And I'm thinking that most likely it's the car Elvis Presley drove on the day that he died.”

That jerks him around. There's dead silence on the line for a minute, which I kind of enjoy, and then he says, “Now who did you tell me you were?”

“I didn't,” I say. “But my mother was Laura Berry and she toured with—”

“Good God,” said the man. “Good God. Are you trying to tell me that you're Honey's daughter?”

Honey? I don't know what this old duffer's talking about, but at least I have his attention. “I found the car in a shed—”

“And how is our sweet Honey Bear?” he says. “Is she there?”

Your sweet Honey Bear's dead,
I think, but somehow I can't bring myself to say the words out loud. “Who is this?” I ask. “Who am I talking to?”

He says his name's Fred and starts rapid-firing all sorts of information. How he ran the road tours back in the day, how he knew my mother. What a pretty little thing she was, just as sweet as her name, and then he gets going on how if this car I'm talk­ing about is the real McDeal—that's just how he says it, the real ­McDeal—then it's far too precious to be driven. If it's the real McDeal, it'll need to be hauled back to Memphis.

“You know,” Fred says, “if what you have there truly is the last of the Blackhawks, then the only person who ever sat behind the wheel of that particular car was Mr. Elvis Presley himself. Which is why we can't let anybody else drive it now.”

I hate to pop the guy's bubble, but obviously that's not true. Elvis died in Tennessee and the car's in South Carolina, so unless this old coot is saying a ghost drove the Blackhawk from Memphis to Beaufort—which I wouldn't put it past a Graceland authenticator to suggest—somebody else must have sat behind
the wheel. Most likely my mother, Laura Berry Ainsworth, aka Honey Bear.

“Didn't Elvis give a lot of cars away?” I say weakly, although I know for a fact that he did. I've read all the biographies. I've made a study of the man. “Isn't there a chance he might have given the car to one of his backup singers?”

“Not the Blackhawk,” Fred says with a sort of flat-out unarguable uncertainty. “It was his favorite.” And then he starts up on how I need to give him my address and send him pictures and if it turns out to be the real McDeal they'll put somebody on a plane to come out and look at it. But under no circumstances am I to crank that car. He seems to still be under the impression that the Blackhawk teleported itself across four states, but at least he's finally stopped asking about Honey. I think he's figured out the answer isn't going to be anything he'd like.

I'm just getting ready to give him my address when I see Leary go by in the tow truck. So I tell Fred I'll have to call him back and he immediately gets huffy and calls me “young lady” in that tone old men get, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I find myself in the mood to stick beans up my nose. What I mean is, I get stubborn. Maybe it's impossible that Elvis would have given his Blackhawk away, but it's even more impossible to imagine that my mother would have stolen it. She rarely talked about Elvis. Never talked about that year on the road. As far as I know, she only kept one memento, a picture of her standing in a dark paneled room wearing a blue satin jumpsuit with her arm around another girl. A black woman, similarly bedazzled, evidently another of the backup singers. When I asked her why she kept that one snapshot when she'd thrown away all the others,
she pointed to the background. A man's face, reflected in a mirror, turned in profile. Looking down, looking a little sad, apparently unaware he'd been caught by the photographer too.

“It's the very best picture I have of Elvis,” Mama said.

“Young lady, that car belongs at Graceland, at least if it's the one you claim it is,” the voice on the phone is saying, but Leary's tow truck is rolling out of sight now and I hang up, glad it's a pay phone, glad that when Fred calls back it's going to just ring and ring into infinity, with nobody to hear.

Screw the authenticators. If that car belongs in Graceland, I'm the one who's going to take it there.

“Well, shit,”
says Leary.

“Precisely. I couldn't have said it better myself.”

“Look at the size of that hood.”

“I know. A girl could lie down and die on that hood.”

Leary sticks his head in the door I'd left open and looks around. “But it's kinda cramped inside, isn't it? That little jump seat in the back wouldn't hardly hold a dog.”

“Look at the radio,” I say. “AM/FM with an eight-track. I think the trim is real twenty-four-karat gold. That's why it isn't tarnished. And listen to this.” I hit the horn and it blares out the chorus of “Never on a Sunday,” so loud that the grimy windows in the shed start to tremble.

Leary leans back on his haunches. “Well, shit.”

I love Leary. He and I went to school together and every girl needs to have gone to high school with a mechanic. He's come and picked me up when I got in a few scrapes throughout the
years, and he's kept the Toyota going for a decade on little more than Everclear motor oil and a prayer. We never dated. Maybe he wanted to. Maybe not.

“Don't crank it.”

“Why does everybody keep telling me not to crank it?”

He stands up and slowly walks the length of the car, shaking his head as he goes. “I don't know who else is telling you not to crank it, but I'm telling you because if it's sat here as long as it looks like it has, any gas left in it has turned to varnish. And if you flood the carburetor with varnish, you'll ruin it, and then we're really screwed.”

He sounds so sure of himself. It's a side of Leary I've never seen.

“So what do we need to do?”

He raises an eyebrow. “We?”

“What do you need to do? To get it to run, I mean.”

“Drain the gas, pull the plugs, lube the rings. Who knows, maybe the other fluid levels are okay; they don't decompose like gas. The tires are flat as a pancake, anybody can see that. Where the hell did this come from?”

“You know as much as I do. I just found it today.”

“And you never knew it was here? Was this your daddy's car?”

“Can you see Bradley driving a car like this down Bay Street?”

“Not really.”

“So it must have been my mama's.”

Leary looks up from under the hood. “And I believe I'm going to have to call bullshit on that, Cory Beth Ainsworth. Your mama was a preacher's daughter.”

“Maybe so, but that's not all she was.”

“She spent twenty years as a choir director,” Leary adds, as if that settles the matter. “And she directed me in the Christmas pageant three years in a row. Shepherd the first year, then a wise man, then you finish up as Joseph. That's how it goes.”

There's no point in arguing. I doubt there's even a handful of people in town who know exactly where my mama went during her lost year. There was some talk about a Bible college in Georgia or that she sang backup on a gospel record in Nashville, but it was all so long ago that I don't think there's anyone left to ask. Leary is looking at me like I'm crazy and I need him too much to risk pissing him off.

“So you have all that stuff in the truck?” I ask. “Or at least enough so we can at least get it to where I can crank it?”

Leary sighs. “Those tires most likely have weather rot and, if so, you can't drive on them without risking a blowout on the open road. I can't let you even try, so don't bother jerking your chin at me. And I sure as hell don't have four tires in the truck. I don't even know where you'd have to go to get tires that'd fit a car like this.”

“You said they might have weather rot? Might?”

He pushes back his ball cap and studies me like he can see right inside my head, and see all the wheels and gears going around. “Or they might have just lost their air over time. It seeps out. The longer things sit still without going anywhere, the more they get flabby and soft. Ya know?”

I know. “Inflate them back up,” I say. “I'll risk it.”

Still grumbling and predicting the worst, Leary climbs the hill to his truck to get his tools. I pull the butcher knife out of the bank and follow him, thinking. Well, not thinking, exactly.
I'm in a bit of a daze. The woman in the picture I found all those years ago . . . she was standing half turned to the side with her hand on her hip and her knees kind of swiveled together. A sexy-girl pose, and the other woman was positioned just the same way, only she was swiveling to the left, not the right, so that they looked like a reflection of each other, except that one of them was black and the other was white. The woman in that picture sure didn't look pregnant. She didn't look like she was destined to be anybody's mother or a choir director either. She looked young and pretty and even a little bit slutty under that layer of makeup, her eyes all big and startled, painted on in that comic book way of the seventies. She looked precisely like the kind of girl men might call Honey.

Leary's still digging out tools and muttering under his breath.

“You want a beer?” I ask him.

“You got one?”

“I can get us some.”

“I guess that means you ain't planning to pay me.”

“I'll pay you, at least for the parts.” Leary picks up his toolbox and walks past me. The yard's big, as open as a prairie, but he cuts it close, his shoulder bumping up against mine, like he's trying to knock something into me. Sense, most likely.

“Better make it a six-pack,” he says.

I've got
four stops. First I go to the bank and cash the check I got from Gerry last night. Four hundred and twelve dollars, and if I had a shred of human decency in me, I'd turn the whole
thing over to Leary the minute I get back. But I'm going to need some road money, so I divide the cash into two envelopes, and write Leary's name on one and my name on the other. Then I roll past the neat little split-level where I was raised and I get the picture of Mama with the bedazzled black lady and Elvis. I know just where she kept it: in the cabinet beside the TV where she put all the family photo albums, even though this picture wasn't filed and categorized and taped in like the others. It's always been just floating out there on its own, and I turn it over and see that my mother has written only a single word on the back. “Us.”

Us?

Well, that's damn unhelpful. And not like my mother either. If you pulled out any of the other pictures from their albums, you'd find a whole encyclopedia of facts written on the back. Who's in the picture, the date it was taken, where we were headed to or coming back from, and sometimes even a little comment like, “Fun day!” or “My big girl.” A hundred pictures of me and Bradley and Mama, and I would have sworn, until this morning, that we were the only
us
who had ever meant anything to her. But now I see I was wrong about that and probably a host of other things too. I take the picture and a box of protein bars from the pantry and a nearly full bottle of Excedrin ­Migraine too. Bradley won't miss it. Mama and I were the only ones who ever got headaches around here.

Then I run by the trailer, where I grab some clothes and my guitar, and my last stop is the Exxon, where I pick up Leary's six-pack. I decide to spring for Stella, because he's being a champ about this whole thing, and the kid behind the counter
gives me the fish eye, like he's not the least bit surprised that the same woman who was prank calling Graceland an hour ago is now drinking in the middle of the day. He gives me the change all in ones, even though I've got eleven dollars coming back. I think it's an insult but I'm not sure why.

Screw him. He doesn't get me. Nobody in this town ever did.

“Well, I'm
going to have to eat my words,” Leary says when I get back to the shed. “'Cause all four tires inflated right up. I think you can drive on them good enough, as long as you don't push it on the speed. Weather rot doesn't always show up right at once and you don't want to have a blowout on I-95.”

I look into the car. “You didn't try and clean it out, did you?”

“I bagged some stuff. Hell, girl, one of those napkins had a spray of blood on it.”

“Blood? I'm going to need that. In fact, I'm going to need it all.”

He shoots me another one of those Leary looks, but doesn't ask why. “The rest of the fluid levels in the car were pretty good. Even the wiper blades checked out. They had this thing wrapped up tighter than a tick, didn't they? Sometimes when a car sits idle this long you find dirt dauber nests up in the engine, shit like that. But I have to say it looked . . . pretty good. Better than it had any right to.”

“So can I crank it?”

He nods. “It's gonna roar. Seriously, these old muscle cars are loud as shit. This baby's got a big 425 engine and they have no emission systems what-so-fucking-ever.”

That gives me pause. “Is it even legal to drive it?”

“There's no way it'd pass inspection.” He considers me through narrow eyes, although the truth is, Leary's one of those people who squints even when there's no good reason for squinting. Like he probably squints indoors, or in the dark. It might be sexy if a girl was into that kind of thing. “Tell me the truth,” he says. “Exactly where are you planning to take this car?”