Kill Me Tender by Daniel Klein

Author:Daniel Klein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2022-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Elvis did all the driving up to Cape Girardeau while Billy slept in the back seat. “I’m getting too old to keep the hours you do,” he’d said. Elvis didn’t mind. He had thought they might do a bit of singing together on the road, but without Selma to hit the high notes, it wouldn’t have been the same anyhow. A little after they passed through Wickliffe, Elvis woke Billy so he could call out directions.

Elvis had been in Cape Girardeau once before, on his “I’m All Right, Mama” tour about a lifetime and a half ago. He remembered it as your basic hillbilly town, at least judging by the types who had come out to hear him in the local music club. But Billy said it had changed a lot in the last few years; a fish-canning factory had gone up and a whole load of Asians—Koreans, Indochinese, and Hong Kong Chinese—had come in to do the foul-smelling, low-wage work that nobody else wanted to do. And that is why his friend, Fat, had set up shop here. Not until they were pulling up at Fat’s storefront office did Billy mention that he had first met Fat in Seoul, Korea, when he was an army medic over there.

From the outside, Fat’s office looked more like a florist shop than a medical center. Hanging plants and potted flowers totally covered the inside of the front window and, combined with the condensation from the plants’ gasses, obscured any view of the interior. Billy knocked on the door, then let himself and Elvis in. Although it was considerably smaller than the waiting room of Billy’s cavernous truck-garage-cum-clinic, the crowd sitting and standing against the wall in Fat’s waiting room looked pretty much the same—mostly youngish women and their children along with a scattering of elderly people, many of them dozing. Except, of course, these people were Asian, not black.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Jackson,” a young Korean woman in starched whites called from her black lacquer reception desk. She was a fine-looking woman with silky black hair that hung to her waist. Elvis had to wonder if there were beauties like this one and Selma hidden away in clinics all over the world. “Dr. Fat is expecting you,” she said, and immediately led them through a beaded curtain to the room behind it.

There, a girl of no more than six was lying fully clothed on a padded table, her eyes closed, while a very tall and thin man in a white robe swung a brass kettle suspended from colorful strands of cloth over the length of her body. Something in the kettle was bubbling, and it gave off a pungent odor that reminded Elvis of the take-out food one of his drummers was always eating in his hotel room. The tall man was so focused on his kettle swinging that he did not appear to notice Billy and Elvis had entered and were standing just behind him. After a few more passes of the

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