Stories (2011)

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “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 Mid-East. 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 Rest 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, 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 cut, and the lights that were on were dimmed to a watery egg-yolk 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 Rest, 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 nuthouse?

  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 gray. (“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 as short as 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 . . . “ and 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.

  “You get in there with me,” he said, “and I’ll take that shower.”

  “You silly thing,” she said, and pulled his nightgown down and stood and removed her plastic gloves and dropped them in the trash-can beside his bed.

  “Why don’t you pull on it a little?” Elvis said.

  “You ought to be ashamed,” the nurse said, but she smiled when she said it.

  She left the room door open after she left. This concerned Elvis a little, but he felt his bed was at such an angle no one could look in, and if they did, tough luck. He wasn’t going to look a gift hard-on in the pee-hole. He pulled the sheet over him and pushed his hands beneath the sheets and got his gown pulled up over his belly. He took hold of his snake and began to choke it with one hand, running his thumb over the pus-filled bump. With his other hand, he fondled his balls. He thought of Priscilla and the pretty black nurse and Bull’s daughter and even the blue-haired fat lady with ELVIS tattooed on her butt, and he stroked harder and faster, and goddamn but he got stiffer and stiffer, and the bump on his cock gave up its load first, exploded hot pus down his thighs, and then his balls, which he thought forever empty, filled up with juice and electricity, and finally he threw the switch. The dam broke and the juice flew. He heard himself scream happily and felt hot wetness jetting down his legs, splattering as far as his big toes.

  “Oh God,” he said softly. “I like that. I like that.”

  He closed his eyes and slept. And for the first time in a long time, not fitfully.

  Lunchtime. The Shady Rest lunch room.

  Elvis sat with a plate of steamed carrots and broccoli and flaky roast beef in front of him. A dry roll, a pat of butter and a short glass of milk soldiered on the side. It was not inspiring.

  Next to him, The Blue Yodeler was stuffing a carrot up her nose while she expounded on the sins of God, The Heavenly Father, for knocking up that nice Mary in her sleep, slipping up her ungreased poontang while she snored, and—bless her little heart—not even knowing it, or getting a clit throb from it, but waking up with a belly full of baby and no memory of action.

  Elvis had heard it all before. It used to offend him, this talk of God as rapist, but he’d heard it so much now he didn’t care. She rattled on.

  Across the way, an old man who wore a black mask and sometimes a white Stetson, known to residents and staff alike as Kemosabe, snapped one of his two capless cap pistols at the floor and called for an invisible Tonto to bend over so he could drive him home.

  At the far end of the table, Dillinger was talking about how much whisky he used to drink, and how many cigars he used to smoke before he got his dick cut off at the stump and split so he could become a she and hide out as a woman. Now she said she no longer thought of banks and machine guns, women and fine cigars. She now thought about spots on dishes, the colors of curtains and drapes as coordinated with carpets and walls.

  Even as the depression of his surroundings settled over him again, Elvis deliberated last night, and glanced down the length of the table at Jack (Mr. Kennedy), who headed its far end. He saw the old man was looking at him, as if they sh
ared a secret.

  Elvis’s ill mood dropped a notch; a real mystery was at work here, and come nightfall, he was going to investigate.

  Swing the Shady Rest Convalescent Home’s side of the Earth away from the sun again, and swing the moon in close and blue again. Blow some gauzy clouds across the nasty, black sky. Now ease on into 3 A.M.

  Elvis awoke with a start and turned his head toward the intrusion. Jack stood next to the bed looking down at him. Jack was wearing a suit coat over his nightgown and he had on thick glasses. He said, “Sebastian. It’s loose.”

  Elvis collected his thoughts, pasted them together into a not-tooscattered collage. “What’s loose?”

  “It,” said Sebastian. “Listen.”

  Elvis listened. Out in the hall he heard the scuttling sound of the night before. Tonight, it reminded him of great locust-wings beating frantically inside a small cardboard box, the tips of them scratching at the cardboard, cutting it, ripping it apart.

  “Jesus Christ, what is it?” Elvis said.

  “I thought it was Lyndon Johnson, but it isn’t. I’ve come across new evidence that suggests another assassin.”

  “Assassin?”

  Jack cocked an ear. The sound had gone away, moved distant, then ceased.

  “It’s got another target tonight,” said Jack. “Come on. I want to show you something. I don’t think it’s safe if you go back to sleep.”

  “For Christ sake,” Elvis said. “Tell the administrators.”

  “The suits and the white starches,” Jack said. “No thanks. I trusted them back when I was in Dallas, and look where that got my brain and me. I’m thinking with sand here, maybe picking up a few waves from my brain. Someday, who’s to say they won’t just disconnect the battery at the White House?”

  “That’s something to worry about, all right,” Elvis said.

  “Listen here,” Jack said. “I know you’re Elvis, and there were rumors, you know . . . about how you hated me, but I’ve thought it over. You hated me, you could have finished me the other night. All I want from you is to look me in the eye and assure me you had nothing to do with that day in Dallas, and that you never knew Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby.”