‘Who?’
‘The one’s gone missing.’ She touched her nose, conspiratorially. ‘He don’t think I know nothing about what’s going on in the world but I have my sources.’ She lifted her blanket and there, beneath the covers, was a tiny, handheld square box with a screen of wobbly lines and static. ‘Soaps is about all that keeps me going out here, when I can get ’em. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Lord Jesus Christ with all my heart, yes I do, but the way I figure it, if the Lord had meant us to be bored, he wouldn’t have given us television.’
I laughed, and with it my fear of Marilyn’s age and infirmity receded. I glanced up to make sure the Rev was still lost in song. ‘What did you mean when you said he put you here?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I didn’t mean nothing by it,’ she sighed. ‘When the pain gets real bad I say things. It’s the devil, I know, puts bad ideas in my mind. Pa understands. He’s a good man. Wasn’t always that way. But he’s a good man.’
She wanted to tell the truth about the Reverend. All she needed was a little prodding. ‘So what way was he before?’
‘He used to lay his fists on me,’ she whispered. ‘Broke just about every bone in my body at one time or another. Times was tough then, raising a family. Tyler worked the rigs, real work, you know, dangerous. He used to drink hard. But then he found Jesus and asked for His forgiveness, and for mine, and I had to give it. When I see the way Tyler changed, that’s when I truly realised miracles happen. The kids still find it hard to forgive. Our boy Johnny, he’s a elected sheriff down in Texas, you know, he’s doing all right, gonna run for mayor. Our girl, well, she ain’t doing so great. I’d like to help her, but we put everything we got into this rig. Pa says the Lord has a plan for us and I have faith in him. I’ve got to have faith. I just get so tired of this life. Don’t understand why there’s got to be so much pain. Pass me them pills, will you?’
I didn’t know if I could trust myself to pick up her OxyContin. The bottle felt like it was burning in my trembling hand. ‘I am going to leave this broken body behind,’ said Marilyn, snatching it from me. ‘I am going to sit with the Lord in Paradise one day.’ Her fingers fiddled furiously with the lid, then she shoved the bottle irritably back. ‘Open that, will you? Damn fingers. Can’t do nothing for myself no more.’ I popped the lid. The pills glowed like unholy orbs, chattering on a frequency only I could hear, promising not the Earth and all its kingdoms but nothing, sweet nothing, pure oblivion. Marilyn’s eyes drilled into me as I shook a couple into her outstretched palm. She recognised the need, the way addicts always recognise one another. ‘You want some of these? It’ll ease the pain,’ she said.
Would every waking moment from now on be like this, I wondered, a battle for my soul? ‘I can’t,’ I grunted, snapping the lid back in place.
‘Suit yourself,’ she said. ‘If you’ll excuse me, it’s time for Almost Heaven, got to find out if the young doctor ran away with the dentist’s wife, if I can pick up a damn signal.’ She disappeared under the covers to watch her TV. The last words I heard were a muffled, ‘Lord, I’d kill for a cigarette.’
I moved up front, next to the Rev. ‘Better days are coming soon,’ he announced. ‘But first there will be a war between the forces of good and evil. You have to decide which side you’re on, son.’
‘I wish it was as easy as that, Reverend,’ I sighed.
I sat, vacantly entranced by the highway. Tree-covered hills hinted at home but on such an epic scale my memories were dwarfed. It was like Ireland reconstructed by a megalomaniac. The sky was vast, the hills endlessly undulating, the fields mathematically multiplying. I was lost in the landscape. I was a bug on the windscreen. When I snapped out of my waking dream, dusk was filtering out the detail, my vision degenerating into static. Still we drove, engine humming with subsonic familiarity beneath me, taking me back to the cocoon of the road, so many journeys in vans and coaches to the promise of a stage, a spotlight, an audience, a moment when I might exist outside of my own imagination, inside someone else’s.
‘I think we’ll pull in for the night,’ said the Reverend. Out of the darkness loomed the artificial lights of a sprawling truck stop. A gang of bikers briefly swarmed around us, flags and bandanas trailing, as we crept past shadowy canyons of parked rigs. I covered my face as a beefy motorcyclist glared in the window, made the sign of the cross and peeled away.
The rigs stretched on, forming a craggy skyline, cabs perched atop enormous wheels, a mobile city that had ground to a halt. The avenues of vehicles loomed deserted and dangerous, as if all human life had withdrawn to the neon-lit hub of gas tanks, diners, bars and stores, lit up like a twenty-four-hour retail village in the centre distance. We kept moving, crossing into a compound behind a tall wire fence, where at least fifty motorhomes were parked in neat, orderly rows. The Rev expertly slotted in between a luxurious Sundowner and a gleaming Airstream, his battered RV with hand-painted signs lowering the tone of the neighbourhood. A blind rattled up next door and a red, round face peered out, nodded at the Reverend then retreated. ‘There’s a motor chapel here, where I can do a little of the Lord’s business,’ announced the Reverend. ‘Replenish the coffers.’
I looked out warily. Where did I go from here? ‘Wanna get something to eat?’ offered the Rev. My stomach jumped to attention. But the café was bustling with truck drivers and travelling salesmen, and I had a vision of conversations breaking up mid-sentence, even the jukebox grinding to a halt. So I politely declined, while my stomach growled in protest.
‘Well, all right, I’ll bring you something back. Just keep an eye on Ma for me.’ The Reverend looked me up and down carefully, before pocketing the RV keys. ‘There’s nothing here worth stealing, son,’ he said.
‘I wouldn’t steal from you, Reverend,’ I protested.
‘I have looked into your heart, and I believe what you’re saying is true,’ said the Rev.
Almost as soon as the door shut behind him, Marilyn groaned theatrically, leading me to suspect she had only been pretending to sleep. ‘Come here, son. Fix me some of my medication.’ As I sat down, she snatched my hand. ‘Where are we? Oh, it doesn’t matter. Another truck stop, I know. They all look the same after a while. You play cards?’
‘Not really,’ I admitted.
‘That’s fine. I’ll whip your bony ass.’ Marilyn smiled, and through the wrinkles and rheumy eyes, something coquettish flashed, a feeble memory of long-faded sex appeal. ‘You got any money?’
‘I thought the Church frowned on gambling.’
‘What he don’t see don’t hurt him.’
‘Doesn’t God see everything?’
‘I’m talking about the Reverend,’ she laughed, then had to lie still for a while to catch her breath, her fingers gripping mine as tightly as she could. After a while, she recovered enough to fish about beneath her blankets, emerging with a pack of cards.
‘What else have you got down there?’ I asked.
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ she snapped back coarsely, then brayed with laughter which quickly turned into a hissing, airless cough. I waited for her to breathe again but her mouth popped like a fish flapping out of water. Every scratchy sound was an exhalation, her eyes wild with panic. I stared helplessly as she jabbed a finger towards the oxygen machine. There were knobs and buttons, but which should I turn, which should I press? She snatched weakly at the plastic oxygen mask and I clumsily fixed it around her face. But there was no oxygen catching. She gestured limply at a liquid tube by the bedside. She was sinking fast. What had I seen the Reverend do? I fumbled with the tube, trying to slot it into the machine with thick fingers, but it wouldn’t fit.
‘Fuck!’ I yelled, the sound of each death rattle booming in my ears. Her eyes made an almost imperceptible blink of confirmation. I snapped the bottle into the slot. Now which button? I banged the reddest, most urgent-looking one, and the machine spluttered into life. Marilyn’s body arced as her throat opened and she sucked precious oxygen into her lungs with shudderin
g relief.
She flopped back, feeble, pathetic, old and broken. I sat, drained and shaking beside her. She nearly died on my watch. I felt like I had been here before, that I was always here, crammed to my gills with guilt and fear. As the oxygen machine heaved and groaned, mist filled my eyes, blurring my vision. Tears again. Who knew I had so many locked inside? Marilyn croaked something in a faint whisper.
‘What’s that?’ I said, leaning closer.
‘I need a …’ But I couldn’t catch the last word. I moved my ear to her cracked blue lips. ‘I need a cigarette,’ she hissed.
I almost shook her off in dismay. She had just put us both through that horrific gasping for air, and now she wanted to fill her tattered lungs with smoke? ‘I can’t do that,’ I insisted. ‘The Reverend …’
‘Fuck the Reverend,’ she snarled. She clung to me with a fierceness that belied her wasted appearance. ‘I want a cigarette. I want a damn smoke before I die. Get me some cigarettes … please.’
‘No,’ I said, trying to wriggle free of her desperate fingers.
‘I’ll tell Tyler who you are,’ she whined. ‘I’ll tell him, and see what he has to say then. That’s right. I know who you are. I know.’
I pulled myself away. ‘I’m nobody. I’m just hitching a ride.’
‘You’re him,’ she pressed, angrily. ‘The singer. Don’t think cause I’m old I don’t know nothing. Everyone’s looking for you.’
‘I never asked them to.’
‘I don’t care about that. All I want is a cigarette,’ she pleaded. ‘Just one cigarette. I won’t tell Tyler nothing if you get me a cigarette. It’ll be our secret. Look, I’ll give you the money. I’ll trade you my pills if you want.’ She reached for a purse, and poured some change out on the blankets.
‘All right.’ I reluctantly snatched the money. ‘It’s your funeral.’
‘Yes it is,’ she sighed. ‘I pray for the day.’
I made sure the coast was clear before stepping into the night. I had all of four dollars in change to my name but I didn’t think I was going to spend it on cigarettes. I would have liked to say thank you and goodbye to the Rev but it was time to move on. I skulked between motorhomes, seeking out shadows in the spaces between tall orange lamplights. From inside thin walls, I could hear TV sets, radios, muffled conversations. I crossed an overlit ramp towards the dark alleys of parked rigs, but halted as a bearded, shabby road tramp shuffled into the sodium glare. ‘Spare some change, friend?’ he muttered, swigging from a brown paper bag. There were shapes moving in the spaces between vehicles, hookers and hobos, hustlers of the forecourt. I had to keep moving, but not towards the lights of the gas station, nor the neon cross of a chapel where The Rev was plying his trade. I headed for the wire periphery, with the tramp shouting half-hearted abuse in my wake.
And then I saw Elvis, across the interstate, beckoning me, a saviour in my hour of need. Well, a gaudily painted, twenty-five-foot giant fibreglass Elvis, with a jaw like a lantern and a gaping hole in his side, apparently made by some kind of vehicular collision. He listed badly to the left but was unmistakably the long-lost firstborn of rock and roll, an impression confirmed by a flashing sign: RIDE WITH THE KING. LED letters raced across the flat-top building behind him: KING’S AUTOS: USED & NEW. 24 HOURS. I scuttled across the empty interstate. I still had my Amex Black. I could buy a car and get the fuck out of Dodge. I’d be dust on the highway before anyone realised what was going on.
The sole occupant of the brightly lit lobby was a soft, round, egg-shaped young man, tightly squeezed into a faux gold suit. Perched unconvincingly atop his head was a jet black Presley pompadour that might have been fashioned out of plastic string. He was fiddling at a vending machine as the glass doors slid open. With a candy bar clutched guiltily in one fist, he looked like he didn’t know whether to give me a sales pitch or call security. I guess I was quite a sight, a scrawny, bruised, brown-skinned tramp dressed in the same jeans and ragged T-shirt I had been wearing for a week. ‘I wanna buy a car,’ I yelled, to make it easier for him.
‘Uh, uh, welcome, welcome to the Graceland of automobiles,’ he announced, remembering his lines. ‘We can fix you up with a ride fit for a king, whatever your budget.’ He tried to shove his candy bar into a jacket pocket, but it was sewn shut. ‘Uh, uh, what kind of vehicle did you have in mind?’
‘Something I can drive straight out of here,’ I said. There was a sleek, low-slung canary-yellow sports coupé parked in the foyer. I patted the roof. ‘This’ll do. What is it?’
‘Uh, uh, please don’t touch that, sir. It’s kind of a display thing. This here’s a classic Dodge Viper, belongs to my boss. I don’t know if it’s really for sale …’ He peered at me a little closer, and blinked slowly. ‘You’re Zero,’ he announced.
‘And you must be Elvis,’ I said.
‘Uh … uh … uh …’ he stuttered.
‘It’s OK,’ I said, before he could get his brain in gear. ‘Don’t believe what you’ve been reading online. It’s all a publicity stunt.’ I needed to make this as easy for him as possible. I pulled out my Amex Black. ‘You know what that is? I want to buy a car. I’ll take the most expensive car you have on the lot. I’ll pay top dollar. I’ll put a little extra commission on just for you. The only condition is I want to drive it out right now, with a tank full of petrol.’
‘Uh, well, uh, I guess, we got a 1996 Cadillac De Ville, uh, really good deal, or I could offer you a great price on a Lincoln Continental, very nice family car. Got one on the lot for under six thousand dollars.’
‘You’re not paying attention. What’s the most expensive car you’ve got here?’
‘Well, that would be the Dodge Viper.’
‘I’ll take it,’ I said.
‘Don’t you want to know how much it is?’
‘How much is it?’
‘Eighty-eight thousand dollars. My boss said if anyone asked, eighty-eight thousand is the price he would let it go for.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘Sounds like a bargain. Let’s round it up to ninety grand for your commission, fill it up with gas, shove some of the candy snacks from that vending machine in the boot, and get it on the road.’
I waved the credit card in his face, and he came out of his trance and took hold of it. ‘Well, uh, thank you very much,’ he said.
‘That’s more like it, Elvis,’ I grinned.
‘So this is really a stunt?’ he said, hopefully, as he pushed the card into his processing terminal.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It was my manager’s idea. Pretty good, huh? You can’t buy this kind of publicity.’
‘Can I get your autograph? Uh, uh, for my wife?’
‘Sure,’ I said, grabbing a pen from his desk. ‘Would that be Priscilla?’
‘No. C’mon. I’m not the real Elvis.’ Then he blushed. ‘You know that.’
‘Just kidding. Have you got something for me to sign? Who should I write it to?’
‘Sandy,’ he said, shoving a car brochure into my hand. ‘Can you make it personal?’
‘Whatever you want.’
‘How about, “Sandy you’re a star.”’
I scribbled his request. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Elvis frowning at the card machine.
‘Ninety thousand, right?’ he said.
‘There’s no limit on that card, Elvis. I could buy an aeroplane with that. I could buy your whole lot.’
‘I’ll try it again.’
‘Nice suit,’ I said, trying to keep him talking as we waited for the bleeps.
‘Uh, it doesn’t really fit me too well,’ he stammered. ‘I’m just the Night Elvis. See, uh, the Day Elvis, uh, he’s a bit slimmer.’
‘Your boss makes you share the suit?’
‘Day Elvis is the boss. My uncle, really. I’m just, uh, helping out during college break.’
‘At college and married already? Way to go, Elvis.’
‘Truthfully, I’m not married.’
‘So who’s Sandy?�
�
‘I’m Sandy,’ he blushed. ‘I’m afraid the card has been declined.’ He looked crestfallen.
‘There’s obviously been a mistake, Sandy.’ I knew exactly what had happened. Fucking Beasley had stopped my credit. ‘You know who I am. You know I’m good for it. Why don’t you just give me the keys to the car and I will have my accountant come around in the morning and sort this out.’
‘I can’t do that, sir.’
‘OK, well, maybe not the Dodge Viper. How about that Continental? Six grand, you said. I spend more than that on lunch. C’mon, I’ll mail it to you, Sandy, how about it?’ I could see he was wavering. He wanted to help. Everybody wants to help a celebrity. ‘I’ll throw in some concert tickets. VIP.’
But then the penny dropped. ‘There’s a million-dollar reward for you,’ he said.
‘Just give me the card back,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry, sir. I have to retain it. I’ve got to call American Express. You just wait here now.’
‘Fuck,’ I snapped.
‘There’s no need to be like that, sir. I’m sure we can sort this out.’ He started to dial.
I turned tail.
‘Stop!’ he yelled, in high-pitched panic. ‘I’ve got a gun here.’
I spun around to be confronted by a fat, red-faced Elvis pulling a stubby black shotgun from under his desk. I raised my hands in surrender but kept walking backwards. ‘Are you going to shoot me, Elvis?’ I said. ‘For what? Running away from home?’
‘There’s a reward,’ he said, voice trembling.
‘I don’t think it’s Dead or Alive.’ I heard the sliding doors open behind me, stepped back, turned and ran.
I hammered through the lot and across the interstate, startled for an instant by the headlights and horn blast of a passing vehicle. I dashed for cover among the big rigs. Scampering between massive long-haul trucks, I disturbed a slip of a teenage hooker negotiating with a thickset driver. They stared at me balefully but then I heard the hooker mutter, ‘Zero!’
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