Last Ride to Graceland by Kim Wright

Author:Kim Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

HONEY

Something’s wrong with our song. Bad wrong, but it’s not what Marilee thinks it is. She says it’s because we got a man to sing a woman’s story, but the trouble goes way deeper than that.

Daughter and water. It’s off, and not just because the words don’t make a perfect rhyme.

Marilee wants me to throw the tape into the nearest Dumpster. I told her I would. Put my hand on an imaginary Bible and said, “I swear.”

But this tape . . . it was just the three of us in the jungle room and he kept putting his head back against the carpeted wall. He looked awful. Bloated and sweaty, and he was messing up the words. And Marilee said, “You need to go to sleep, baby. You need to do whatever it takes to get yourself to sleep.”

Three days later, after he’d truly done whatever it took to get himself to sleep, when Marilee and I were in the car and barreling south from Memphis, one of us pushed the tape in. We listened until the bitter end, to the part where Elvis stops singing and Marilee says, so soft and gentle, that he needs to sleep. And she added, “Put yourself in the hands of Jesus. You and I know there’s nothing down here worth sticking around for.”

When Marilee heard her own words coming back to her, she panicked. She slammed on the brakes and pulled off the road and started looking around her, all wild, even though we were just sitting on this nothing road in north Mississippi, without another car even in sight.

“I’ll drive,” I said, but she shook her head.

“It sounds like I’m telling him to take his drugs,” she said. “Don’t you understand? Sweet Jesus, on this tape it sounds like I’m telling the man he may as well go upstairs and kill himself.”

“That wasn’t what you meant,” I said. “Everybody was always telling him to take his drugs.” And this was true. An unmedicated Elvis was like living with a bull, or with a 250-pound toddler, and there wasn’t a person at Graceland who didn’t at some time or another urge the man to dose himself and let us have some peace. “And everybody knows what you meant by putting it in the hands of Jesus. You’ve got a hundred people who’ll swear that’s nothing more than the prayer we used to say before showtime.”

But even while I was trying to reassure her, I knew why she was worried. Her words could be twisted so easily in a Tennessee courthouse. An angry mob was probably already assembling outside the gates of Graceland, demanding to know who among us had killed their King. We all felt guilty and, in a way, we were all guilty. I daresay as they were pushing him out of Graceland on the gurney with the sheet over his face, everybody lining the halls was thinking back to what he or she might have said. Or what they didn’t say, which is worse.

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