Stories (2011) (68 page)

“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.