The Best of Joe R. Lansdale Page 4

  The young woman turned and looked at him, “I suppose,” she said. She went to the trashcan and bent over it and showed her black panties to Elvis as she rummaged. He knew the revealing of her panties was neither intentional or unintentional. She just didn’t give a damn. She saw him as so physically and sexually non-threatening, she didn’t mind if he got a bird’s-eye view of her; it was the same to her as a house cat sneaking a peek.

  Elvis observed the thin panties straining and slipping into the caverns of her ass cheeks and felt his pecker flutter once, like a bird having a heart attack, then it laid down and remained limp and still.

  Well, these days, even a flutter was kind of reassuring.

  The woman surfaced from the trashcan with a photo and the Purple Heart, went over to Elvis’s bed and handed them to him.

  Elvis dangled the ribbon that held the Purple Heart between his fingers, said, “Bull your kin?”

  “My daddy,” she said.

  “I haven’t seen you here before.”

  “Only been here once before,” she said. “When I checked him in.”

  “Oh,” Elvis said. “That was three years ago, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Were you and him friends?”

  Elvis considered the question. He didn’t know the real answer. All he knew was Bull listened to him when he said he was Elvis Presley and seemed to believe him. If he didn’t believe him, he at least had the courtesy not to patronize. Bull always called him Elvis, and before Bull grew too ill, he always played cards and checkers with him.

  “Just roommates,” Elvis said. “He didn’t feel good enough to say much. I just sort of hated to see what was left of him go away so easy. He was an all right guy. He mentioned you a lot. You’re Callie, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Well, he was all right.”

  “Not enough you came and saw him though.”

  “Don’t try to put some guilt trip on me, Mister. I did what I could. Hadn’t been for Medicaid, Medicare, whatever that stuff was, he’d have been in a ditch somewhere. I didn’t have the money to take care of him.”

  Elvis thought of his own daughter, lost long ago to him. If she knew he lived, would she come to see him? Would she care? He feared knowing the answer.

  “You could have come and seen him,” Elvis said.

  “I was busy. Mind your own business. Hear?”

  The chocolate-skin nurse with the grapefruit tits came in. Her white uniform crackled like cards being shuffled. Her little white nurse hat was tilted on her head in a way that said she loved mankind and made good money and was getting regular dick. She smiled at Callie and then at Elvis. “How are you this morning, Mr. Haff?”

  “All right,” Elvis said. “But I prefer Mr. Presley. Or Elvis. I keep telling you that. I don’t go by Sebastian Haff anymore. I don’t try to hide anymore.”

  “Why, of course,” said the pretty nurse. “I knew that. I forgot. Good morning, Elvis.”

  Her voice dripped with sorghum syrup. Elvis wanted to hit her with his bed pan.

  The nurse said to Callie: “Did you know we have a celebrity here, Miss Jones? Elvis Presley. You know, the rock and roll singer?”

  “I’ve heard of him,” Callie said. “I thought he was dead.”

  Callie went back to the dresser and squatted and set to work on the bottom drawer. The nurse looked at Elvis and smiled again, only she spoke to Callie. “Well, actually, Elvis is dead, and Mr. Haff knows that, don’t you, Mr. Haff?”

  “Hell no,” said Elvis. “I’m right here. I ain’t dead, yet.”

  “Now, Mr. Haff, I don’t mind calling you Elvis, but you’re a little confused, or like to play sometimes. You were an Elvis impersonator. Remember? You fell off a stage and broke your hip. What was it…Twenty years ago? It got infected and you went into a coma for a few years. You came out with a few problems.”

  “I was impersonating myself,” Elvis said. “I couldn’t do nothing else. I haven’t got any problems. You’re trying to say my brain is messed up, aren’t you?”

  Callie quit cleaning out the bottom drawer of the dresser. She was interested now, and though it was no use, Elvis couldn’t help but try and explain who he was, just one more time. The explaining had become a habit, like wanting to smoke a cigar long after the enjoyment of it was gone.

  “I got tired of it all,” he said. “I got on drugs, you know. I wanted out. Fella named Sebastian Haff, an Elvis imitator, the best of them. He took my place. He had a bad heart and he liked drugs, too. It was him died, not me. I took his place.”

  “Why would you want to leave all that fame,” Callie said, “all that money?” and she looked at the nurse, like Let’s humor the old fart for a lark.

  “‘Cause it got old. Woman I loved, Priscilla, she was gone. Rest of the women…were just women. The music wasn’t mine anymore. I wasn’t even me anymore. I was this thing they made up. Friends were sucking me dry. I got away and liked it, left all the money with Sebastian, except for enough to sustain me if things got bad. We had a deal, me and Sebastian. When I wanted to come back, he’d let me. It was all written up in a contract in case he wanted to give me a hard time, got to liking my life too good. Thing was, copy of the contract I had got lost in a trailer fire. I was living simple. Way Haff had been. Going from town to town doing the Elvis act. Only I felt like I was really me again. Can you dig that?”

  “We’re digging it, Mr. Haff…Mr. Presley,” said the pretty nurse.

  “I was singing the old way. Doing some new songs. Stuff I wrote. I was getting attention on a small but good scale. Women throwing themselves at me, ‘cause they could imagine I was Elvis — only I was Elvis, playing Sebastian Haff playing Elvis… It was all pretty good. I didn’t mind the contract being burned up. I didn’t even try to go back and convince anybody. Then I had the accident. Like I was saying, I’d laid up a little money in case of illness, stuff like that. That’s what’s paying for here. These nice facilities. Ha!”

  “Now, Elvis,” the nurse said. “Don’t carry it too far. You may just get way out there and not come back.”

  “Oh fuck you,” Elvis said.

  The nurse giggled.

  Shit, Elvis thought. Get old, you can’t even cuss somebody and have it bother them. Everything you do is either worthless or sadly amusing.

  “You know, Elvis,” said the pretty nurse, “we have a Mr. Dillinger here too. And a President Kennedy. He says the bullet only wounded him and his brain is in a fruit jar at the White House, hooked up to some wires and a battery, and as long as the battery works, he can walk around without it. His brain, that is. You know, he says everyone was in on trying to assassinate him. Even Elvis Presley.”

  “You’re an asshole,” Elvis said.

  “I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, Mr. Haff,” the nurse said. “I’m merely trying to give you a reality check.”

  “You can shove that reality check right up your pretty black ass,” Elvis said.

  The nurse made a sad little snicking sound. “Mr. Haff, Mr. Haff. Such language.”

  “What happened to get you here?” said Callie. “Say you fell off a stage?”

  “I was gyrating,” Elvis said. “Doing ‘Blue Moon,’ but my hip went out. I’d been having trouble with it.” Which was quite true. He’d sprained it making love to a blue-haired old lady with ELVIS tattooed on her fat ass. He couldn’t help himself from wanting to fuck her. She looked like his mother, Gladys.

  “You swiveled right off the stage?” Callie said. “Now that’s sexy.”

  Elvis looked at her. She was smiling. This was great fun for her, listening to some nut tell a tale. She hadn’t had this much fun since she put her old man in the rest home.

  “Oh, leave me the hell alone,” Elvis said.

  The women smiled at one another, passing a private joke. Callie said to the nurse: “I’ve got what I want.” She scraped the bright things off the top of Bull’s dresser into her purse. “The clothes can go to Goodwill or the Salvation Army.”


  The pretty nurse nodded to Callie. “Very well. And I’m very sorry about your father. He was a nice man.”

  “Yeah,” said Callie, and she started out of there. She paused at the foot of Elvis’s bed. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Presley.”

  “Get the hell out,” Elvis said.

  “Now, now,” said the pretty nurse, patting his foot through the covers, as if it were a little cantankerous dog. “I’ll be back later to do that…little thing that has to be done. You know?”

  “I know,” Elvis said, not liking the words “little thing.”

  Callie and the nurse started away then, punishing him with the clean lines of their faces and the sheen of their hair, the jiggle of their asses and tits. When they were out of sight, Elvis heard them laugh about something in the hall, then they were gone, and Elvis felt as if he were on the far side of Pluto without a jacket. He picked up the ribbon with the Purple Heart and looked at it.

  Poor Bull. In the end, did anything really matter?

  Meanwhile…

  The Earth swirled around the sun like a spinning turd in the toilet bowl (to keep up with Elvis’s metaphors) and the good old abused Earth clicked about on its axis and the hole in the ozone spread slightly wider, like a shy lady fingering open her vagina, and the South American trees that had stood for centuries, were visited by the dozer, the chainsaw and the match, and they rose up in burned black puffs that expanded and dissipated into minuscule wisps, and while the puffs of smoke dissolved, there were IRA bombings in London, and there was more war in the Mideast. Blacks died in Africa of famine, the HIV virus infected a million more, the Dallas Cowboys lost again, and that Ole Blue Moon that Elvis and Patsy Cline sang so well about, swung around the Earth and came in close and rose over the Shady Grove Convalescent Home, shone its bittersweet, silver-blue rays down on the joint like a flashlight beam shining through a blue-haired lady’s do, and inside the rest home, evil waddled about like a duck looking for a spot to squat, and Elvis rolled over in his sleep and awoke with the intense desire to pee.

  All right, thought Elvis. This time I make it. No more piss or crap in the bed. (Famous last words.)

  Elvis sat up and hung his feet over the side of the bed and the bed swung far to the left and around the ceiling and back, and then it wasn’t moving at all. The dizziness passed.

  Elvis looked at his walker and sighed, leaned forward, took hold of the grips and eased himself off the bed and clumped the rubber padded tips forward, and made for the toilet.

  He was in the process of milking his bump-swollen weasel, when he heard something in the hallway — a kind of scrambling, like a big spider scuttling about in a box of gravel.

  There was always some sound in the hallway, people coming and going, yelling in pain or confusion, but this time of night, three A.M., was normally quite dead.

  It shouldn’t have concerned him, but the truth of the matter was, now that he was up and had successfully pissed in the pot, he was no longer sleepy; he was still thinking about that bimbo, Callie, and the nurse (What the hell was her name?) with the tits like grapefruits, and all they had said.

  Elvis stumped his walker backwards out of the bathroom, turned it, made his way forward into the hall. The hall was semi-dark, with every other light out, and the lights that were on were dimmed to a watery egg yoke yellow. The black and white tile floor looked like a great chessboard, waxed and buffed for the next game of life, and here he was, a semi-crippled pawn, ready to go. Off in the far wing of the home, Old Lady McGee, better known in the home as The Blue Yodeler, broke into one of her famous yodels (she claimed to have sung with a country and western band in her youth), then ceased abruptly. Elvis swung the walker forward and moved on. He hadn’t been out of his room in ages, and he hadn’t been out of his bed much either. Tonight, he felt invigorated because he hadn’t pissed his bed, and he’d heard the sound again, the spider in the box of gravel. (Big spider. Big box. Lots of gravel.) And following the sound gave him something to do.

  Elvis rounded the corner, beads of sweat popping out on his forehead like heat blisters. Jesus. He wasn’t invigorated now. Thinking about how invigorated he was had bushed him. Still, going back to his room to lie on his bed and wait for morning so he could wait for noon, then afternoon and night, didn’t appeal to him.

  He went by Jack McLaughlin’s room, the fellow who was convinced he was John F. Kennedy, and that his brain was in the White House running on batteries. The door to Jack’s room was open. Elvis peeked in as he moved by, knowing full well that Jack might not want to see him. Sometimes he accepted Elvis as the real Elvis, and when he did, he got scared, saying it was Elvis who had been behind the assassination.

  Actually, Elvis hoped he felt that way tonight. It would at least be some acknowledgment that he was who he was, even if the acknowledgment was a fearful shriek from a nut.

  ‘Course, Elvis thought, maybe I’m nuts too. Maybe I am Sebastian Haff and I fell off the stage and broke more than my hip, cracked some part of my brain that lost my old self and made me think I’m Elvis.

  No. He couldn’t believe that. That’s the way they wanted him to think. They wanted him to believe he was nuts and he wasn’t Elvis, just some sad old fart who had once lived out part of another man’s life because he had none of his own.

  He wouldn’t accept that. He wasn’t Sebastian Haff. He was Elvis Goddamn Aaron Fucking Presley with a boil on his dick.

  ‘Course, he believed that, maybe he ought to believe Jack was John F. Kennedy, and Mums Delay, another patient here at Shady Grove, was Dillinger. Then again, maybe not. They were kind of scanty on evidence. He at least looked like Elvis gone old and sick. Jack was black — he claimed The Powers That Be had dyed him that color to keep him hidden — and Mums was a woman who claimed she’d had a sex change operation.

  Jesus, was this a rest home or a nut house?

  Jack’s room was one of the special kind. He didn’t have to share. He had money from somewhere. The room was packed with books and little luxuries. And though Jack could walk well, he even had a fancy electric wheelchair that he rode about in sometimes. Once, Elvis had seen him riding it around the outside circular drive, popping wheelies and spinning doughnuts.

  When Elvis looked into Jack’s room, he saw him lying on the floor. Jack’s gown was pulled up around his neck, and his bony black ass appeared to be made of licorice in the dim light. Elvis figured Jack had been on his way to the shitter, or was coming back from it, and had collapsed. His heart, maybe.

  “Jack,” Elvis said.

  Elvis clumped into the room, positioned his walker next to Jack, took a deep breath and stepped out of it, supporting himself with one side of it. He got down on his knees beside Jack, hoping he’d be able to get up again. God, but his knees and back hurt.

  Jack was breathing hard. Elvis noted the scar at Jack’s hairline, a long scar that made Jack’s skin lighter there, almost grey. (“That’s where they took the brain out,” Jack always explained, “put it in that fucking jar. I got a little bag of sand up there now.”)

  Elvis touched the old man’s shoulder. “Jack. Man, you okay?”

  No response.

  Elvis tried again. “Mr. Kennedy.”

  “Uh,” said Jack (Mr. Kennedy).

  “Hey, man. You’re on the floor,” Elvis said.

  “No shit? Who are you?”

  Elvis hesitated. This wasn’t the time to get Jack worked up.

  “Sebastian,” he said. “Sebastian Haff.”

  Elvis took hold of Jack’s shoulder and rolled him over. It was about as difficult as rolling a jelly roll. Jack lay on his back now. He strayed an eyeball at Elvis. He started to speak, hesitated. Elvis took hold of Jack’s nightgown and managed to work it down around Jack’s knees, trying to give the old fart some dignity.

  Jack finally got his breath. “Did you see him go by in the hall? He scuttled like.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone they sent.”

  “Who’s they?”

>   “You know. Lyndon Johnson. Castro. They’ve sent someone to finish me. I think maybe it was Johnson himself. Real ugly. Real goddamn ugly.”

  “Johnson’s dead,” Elvis said.

  “That won’t stop him,” Jack said.

  Later that morning, sunlight shooting into Elvis’s room through venetian blinds, Elvis put his hands behind his head and considered the night before while the pretty black nurse with the grapefruit tits salved his dick. He had reported Jack’s fall and the aides had come to help Jack back in bed, and him back on his walker. He had clumped back to his room (after being scolded for being out there that time of night) feeling that an air of strangeness had blown into the rest home, an air that wasn’t there the day before. It was at low ebb now, but certainly still present, humming in the background like some kind of generator ready to buzz up to a higher notch at a moment’s notice.

  And he was certain it wasn’t just his imagination. The scuttling sound he’d heard last night, Jack had heard it, too. What was that all about? It wasn’t the sound of a walker, or a crip dragging their foot, or a wheelchair creeping along, it was something else, and now that he thought about it, it wasn’t exactly spider legs in gravel, more like a roll of barbed wire tumbling across tile.

  Elvis was so wrapped up in these considerations, he lost awareness of the nurse until she said, “Mr. Haff!”

  “What…?” He saw that she was smiling and looking down at her hands. He looked too. There, nestled in one of her gloved palms was a massive, blue-veined hooter with a pus-filled bump on it the size of a pecan. It was his hooter and his pus-filled bump.

  “You ole rascal,” she said, and gently lowered his dick between his legs. “I think you better take a cold shower, Mr. Haff.”

  Elvis was amazed. That was the first time in years he’d had a boner like that. What gave here?

  Then he realized what gave. He wasn’t thinking about not being able to do it. He was thinking about something that interested him, and now, with something clicking around inside his head besides old memories and confusions, concerns about his next meal and going to the crapper, he had been given a dose of life again. He grinned his gums and what teeth were in them at the nurse.