The Biggest Elvis

by P. F. Kluge

  “Too bad,” she said, “about Malou.”

  During the next few hours, they watched us and we watched them. We watched the politician call it a night. He drove off and a dozen cars followed him. The genteel folk, I guessed, and just enough to fill out a hometown jury that could say it hadn’t seen what was going to happen next. Rocks and beer cans started in again, music and horns blowing. Then, around midnight, island law enforcement called it an evening. They drove off to cheers, their sirens blaring, lights flashing, as if a crime wave had just broken out on the other side of the island. I hoped I was wrong but I guessed some of them would be back in half an hour, out of uniform.

  We were losing people now. Lucy Number Three said there were four hundred of us to start with, inside a compound that was about the size of a football field. With all the sheds and trailers, the heavy equipment, piles of lumber, and culverts, there was cover for everyone. But then one of the men reported that a woman was climbing up the inside of the fence. We went to the window to look. The people outside applauded, honking their horns. She got up to the top, lifted herself over the fence, hung on for a moment, then dropped to the ground on the other side. The same thing was happening in back, but more quietly. Here, people rushed off into darkness.

  “No surprise,” Lucy Number Three said. Some of the guys asked if she wanted them to try to stop the fence-jumpers. She’d said no: let them go. But space them out, every twenty minutes or so. The crowd liked watching them, liked laughing at them. As long as they kept coming, one deserter after another, there’d be no attack.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked. “This can’t go on.”

  “Stay here,” Lucy Number Three replied.

  “If they come through the fence, I mean. They have guns, some of them.”

  “So. We go out, we raise hand, we go back where we were. Only first, I think, they punish us. The women … you know what they do. The men, beat up and back to work. But the women …”

  Now I saw that there was no plan. No secret tunnel, no cache of arms, no one coming to the rescue. They had put it together—the trucks fanning out around the island like so many schoolbuses, the locked gates, the calls for help. But that was it. And now it was going to end badly, sometime between now and dawn.

  “Or maybe we fight little bit,” Lucy Number Three said. “Some of us. We have knife. If we get close.”

  “People will die then,” I said.

  “Maybe,” she said. She might have been talking about the chance of rain. We heard another cheer from outside as a couple more Filipinos went over the fence. Bit by bit, we were weakening. It didn’t bother her. She saw that I was studying her, trying to figure her out. There was a lot I’d missed. She came over, led me to a corner of the trailer, near a table covered with blueprints, where no one else could hear us. “All the men I have,” Lucy Number Three said, “I know that there is a time when I can hurt them. I’m strong girl. I only got to …”

  She raised her fingers toward my eye, signaling a twist of hand that would leave me blind. Then she nodded at my erotch.

  “Or anytime I want, with these naked guy, I just close my hand so tight and squeeze and nothing they can do … but scream … you know?”

  She was so nonchalant about it. As if she were telling me how to pluck a chicken or bone a fish. Even when she flicked her tongue around her mouth and pursed her lips, a Graceland signal that left nothing to the imagination. “So many times,” she said, “I think, what if I close my mouth right now, till tooth touch tooth.”

  Now I knew that no matter who climbed over the fence, some of them would stay behind with Lucy Number Three.

  “You want to go, you can,” she said. “Over the fence. You take Whitney, it’s okay.”

  “I want to take you all,” I said. “I’ll march out of here with you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The bomb was a crude device, of the sort that became common in the islands after World War II, when unexploded shells littered the islands and people stripped off brass and copper fittings, extracted explosive, packed the powder into coffee cans, inserted fuses, and turned reef fishing into a can’t-miss proposition. It went off noisily, right at midnight, right against the fence. It didn’t do much damage, more noise and smoke than anything, but a couple dozen more of our people left, mostly domestics, rehearsing apologies and downcast smiles. “Sorry, mum,” I could hear them saying to their employers. I could hear it already. “They tell us come to meeting for all our Filipino people. I don’t know what is about. And when I am at that place they close gate and we cannot leave.” That would be the tune. “Those nightclub girls are making trouble.”

  The crowd inside had thinned out but the construction guys weren’t going anywhere and the takeout girls remained too, and a scattering of others, farmers mostly. There were fewer people outside too but that didn’t make me feel any better. It meant that the squeamish on both sides had left, the way cornermen and seconds climb out of the ring before a boxing match starts. It wouldn’t be long now. And, once it started, it wouldn’t take long. A few shots, some scuffles, and, when the fighting ended, the fun would begin: a gamut for the men to run. As for the women: a night to remember, a gang bang, pull-the-train, and then it would all be over, a story that became a rumor. Words like spontaneous and abortive and short-lived would appear in the newspapers, if they covered it at all. Hotheads, outsiders, and troublemakers. A local problem, locally settled. No big thing. Island back to normal. Golf course on schedule.

  Now there were more shots and they weren’t shooting into the air anymore. A window shattered, a barrel of fuel oil started leaking out near the generator. The workers ran around the camp, killing lights. The whole compound was dark except for the headlights in the cars and trucks that were parked outside. They started moving. They drove off the road, into the burned-off field in back of us, so they formed a circle all around the camp. Then, at someone’s command, they moved closer, as if pushing toward a starting line. They blew horns, all at once, like a herd of animals anxious to charge. And we prepared for them. Lucy and Felix, the worker who’d seen me in Olongapo, climbed onto a bulldozer, Elvira and Priscilla joined Nonoy on a grader, others jammed onto the tops of tractors and forklifts, into the backs of dump trucks.

  Now it was all set up, a battle of cars and pickup trucks against bulldozers and graders, our heavy lumbering beasts against their Nissans and four-by-fours, not one battle but a dozen skirmishes which could end all over the island, on the road into town, or outside the church, or up and down the airport runway. Or at the end of the island, where there were cliffs. Oh, it was going to be something here tonight, before it was over. And the mood had changed. And everybody wanted it. That’s what I could feel. They wanted it now.

  “Biggest Elvis,” Whitney said. She reached a hand out to me, as if I were helping her onto a dance floor, but she was gesturing to the top of a bulldozer and the other hand was holding a rake. “Please give me boost.”

  I reached out, not to help her up but to hold her back. “Listen, Whitney. Stay here. Stick close to me and you’ll be all right. We’ll get to the car.”

  “Not all right.” Even Whitney wanted war.

  “You’re with me. They won’t …” It sounded wrong, even before I said it. “They won’t come after an American.”

  “Give me boost,” she repeated.

  I grasped her by the waist. I pulled her toward me. She came willingly. I held her there. “Don’t do this. You can’t win.”

  “You come too,” she said. Whitney was feeling brave. I lifted her up on the bulldozer.

  “What you are doing?” she asked, looking down on me.

  “Watch me now,” I said.

  We were at the end of waiting. The moment had come. Peace was a drag and negotiations were a waste of time and peacemakers, far from being blessed, were a serious pain in everybody’s ass. They were all ready for action. You could feel the hunger on both sides of the fence, the Filipinos mounted on hea
vy equipment, followed by foot soldiers with knives and hammers and two-by-fours with nails hammered in. I could see it in Lucy Number Three and Elvira, in Priscilla and even Whitney: Let’s do it. Let’s get it on. I could see it in the people outside, mounted in cars and pickups, drunk and reckless. No stopping it now. Fighting and fucking were two things that no one—not even Elvis—should get in the way of.

  And yet. I found that little pocket of time before the engines roared, the whistle blew, that silence before the clash when the only question was who moved first, do they rush in, do we rush out, curtsey or bow? I walked to the front gate and signaled for the Filipino guards to open it, which they did. Then I gestured for them to close and lock it again, which they did not do. They ran off and climbed into some trucks.

  So it had come to this. I stood there onstage alone—“emptiness all around”—and an audience watching. Both sides thought that, after opening the gate, I’d make another move. I might go back inside, hop onto a bulldozer and advance, like Hannibal, onto the Marianas plains. Or I might accept the hospitality of my fellow American citizens on the other side. That would disappoint some of the Filipinos but it wouldn’t surprise them. It was what a lot of them would do, even now, if they thought it would work. Or I might just walk away. Or go back to the hotel. I was an outsider. I could be at the airport in the morning.

  I stood there. There was nothing to do or say that would have any effect on what would happen. I stood there in the no-man’s-land between two sides.

  “Get out of there, man!” someone shouted from in front. There were other shouts, less polite. I was blocking traffic. “Get that piece of shit off the road.” I was like a fan who steps out onto a football field, stopping play, before the stadium guards escort him out.

  “You’ll get hurt, my friend.” This time the warning came from behind, softly. “You’d better go now.”

  I just stood there, not proudly. Not like I was stepping up toward the gallows—“It is a far, far better thing”—or in front of a firing squad. More like some hapless schmuck, forced into a police lineup, staring at a window he couldn’t see through. It was half-assed. It was stupid. It was perfect for a fool such as I.

  “Off the road, asshole,” someone shouted, and that, I guess, was when my act began. I bowed, a grand sweeping bow that reminded me of how I’d strode on the stage at Graceland during “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” It was coming to me now, what I was going to do.

  “Get out, Biggest Elvis.” Another warning from behind, pleadingly, from one of the Graceland girls. Never mind. Now I had it. Biggest Elvis. The ending I’d been looking for—the grand finale—one show, one night, farewell performance, till the next Elvis came along—there’d be more, I bet—and it started again, the magic.

  Are you lonesome tonight

  Do you miss me tonight

  Are you sorry we drifted apart …

  No slow build for this performance. I sang at full strength from the beginning, as if my life depended on it. It was hard to know where to turn, with an audience in front, an audience in back. The toughest possible house, between two armies, right in a demilitarized zone. I used to think it was hard, playing to sailors and hostesses, what with beer on the table and sex in the air and money all around. But this was harder: I’d stepped into a fight that both sides were incredibly ready for. I was all that kept them apart. Their irritation with me was all that united them.

  Does your memory stray

  To a bright summer day …

  Carry the gospel to the hardest places, right, Father Domingo? At least they turned off their damned radios. Their ghetto blasters had been silenced. Music hath charms. I thought that I’d be rusty but I still had the voice, the big voice, and the attention of the crowd, both sides of the fence. It sounded different out-of-doors. Graceland—poor Graceland—had raised me up onto a stage, with spotlights and microphones and backup musicians and—oh, where were they now?—the Lane brothers, Chester and Albert. This was pure solo. What I’d always dreaded. A solo act. On the road. A man alone, etc. Car headlights, clouds of dust, a fence behind me. Above me, night and stars. Around me, the sea. Something lonely and primal in the sound of my voice. His voice. Biggest Elvis. That guy.

  Do the chairs in the corner

  Seem empty and bare …

  Resurrecting Elvis never felt more right. Where else but here? Who else but me? Second chance for Elvis, second chance for me. Second chance for the audience. Another shot at intimacy and communion. A couple of bottles came out from the cars, one flying way over my shoulder, the other rolling harmlessly at my feet, no harm done, and I dodged them gracefully—the old moves returning, the lean forward, the backward tilt, the side profile, the frontal pose, Elvis as willing, easy, target. This is my body, assholes, broken for you.

  Is your heart filled with pain,

  Shall I come back again?

  Tell me dear, are you lonesome tonight?

  When I went into “Heartbreak Hotel”—something a little upbeat, please, on this night of nights—they knew I wasn’t going to be leaving. The bottle throwers got serious then, and when things hit, they hurt. They hit more often. They weren’t into chasing me off; this was about bringing me down. I had wondered about those scenes, in biblical movies, when people got stoned. They never danced, never fired back. They just accepted it. They stood and took it and folded down onto their knees and the rocks kept coming, instant funeral cairn. So Biggest Elvis would be covered by a pile of Budweisers and Mountain Dews, all set for recycling. But I kept singing. After “Heartbreak Hotel,” I felt there’d be time for one more song. I was on my knees already and wouldn’t be getting up. “American Trilogy,” then. Because I wanted to complete the circle, to get back to where the magic began, far enough into “All My Sorrows” and the acknowledgment that death comes to all of us, Elvis and Biggest Elvis, and I by God made it, though I took some shots in the head and the taste of blood was in my mouth and no way would I get to “Battle Hymn of the Republic” … that was the good news …. I turned to face the people behind the fence, my people, to see if the girls of Graceland were crossing themselves again, but I couldn’t tell, I couldn’t see, because some headlights were coming at me from the side of the fence, and then I got hit by a Budweiser that was full. This one’s for you! I fell forward, onto the ground, in front of the pickup, and the funny thing was, I couldn’t tell where that Budweiser came from, from which side of the fence. And, at the last, I wondered about the guy who picked up that can of Budweiser that had just hit me. Blood coming down into my eyes, I guessed he’d have foam and spray all over him, if he opened that particular can. Odd, what things come to you. How, come to think of it, I’d lasted about as long as the Original. Forty-two and curtains, for both of us. I wondered if Malou was out there, watching me.

  Epilogue

  Jimmy Fiddler

  He looked like roadkill when we got to him, head first, down on the ground, bleeding from his mouth and out of his hair. Some curtain call. Young Chester Lane jumped out and went right over to him, shielding him with his body, and the bottles stopped coming. It was so nasty, the heart went out of the crowd. What they’d been planning for the Filipinos, they’d given to Biggest Elvis.

  And then too, the older brother—Dude Lane, that would be—went right out into the crowd and they recognized him from his piece-of-shit TV show, Guam-boy who made it in Hollywood, right on the cover of TV Guide. He shook hands, signed autographs, and did little Elvis bits. The king is dead, long live the king. Another damn Elvis.

  Lucky for the Filipinos, I’d say. They get off their heavy equipment and come out the fence to have a look at Biggest Elvis, who’s alive, all right, but not pretty. They didn’t go to war, which was just as well, because they’d have lost, big-time, and they knew it. They just didn’t care anymore, and I couldn’t blame them, really.

  Earlier that night, I’d dropped Malou at her office, meaner than catshit. This wildcat strike was a mess and she had to get hold of Baby Ronquillo. S
o after I left her, I was driving past the harbor and that was when the Lane brothers flagged me down, not knowing who I was. Funny, isn’t it: I drove them to Olongapo for their first concert and I drove them out to the airport, for their last.

  We got there and I’ve got to admit, it was deep-dish strange, watching Biggest Elvis singing and dancing and dodging beer cans, like a vaudeville act that’s bombing. He got clipped in the head, across the mouth, and the dumb shit kept serenading them, down on his knees, the same cornball crap he used to serve up at Graceland. They kept throwing stuff and he was singing and it was as if he wanted it to happen this way, it was all in a script he’d written, a fat peckerhead crooner going out like an Old Testament prophet.

  “Let’s go,” Dude Lane said.

  “Where?”

  “We have to stop it. They’ll kill him.”

  “But the show ain’t over yet,” I said. “We still got the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’” And the both of them gave me this look, so off we went, and the party was over. Chester lifted Biggest Elvis into the back of the truck, which I’m going to have to hose down later, and while Dude worked the crowd, this little Whitney girl jumps in back and I end up driving the meat wagon to the hospital.

  Albert “Dude” Lane

  I stayed at the camp all night, even though nothing was happening. I watched the place empty, bit by bit, and I stepped inside. Saw some of the same faces I remembered from Graceland. Same bodies, too. I couldn’t get out of my mind what Ward did. It was so corny and theatrical and half-assed. I knew it. He knew it. But that didn’t stop him. I saved the day, maybe, working the crowd with handshakes and high fives, hugs and autographs. But Biggest Elvis had fought the main event.

  Chester Lane

  When the plane came in that next morning, a whole bunch of passengers headed straight over to the Nineteenth Hole Corporation. Lots of locals showed up too, but the rumble had gone out of the them. This wasn’t an island thing, anymore. There were outsiders involved: Japanese investors, the Filipino consul, a priest, a couple reporters, and someone from the commonwealth governor’s office. You know, I felt sort of sorry for the locals, the way they looked, a little sulky, a little apologetic. The game had gotten beyond them and it was sad, the way they’d lost control of their island. They’d missed their chance, the night before, and that was the end of something they might never get back.