Stories (2011) (70 page)

Soul-sucking menace?

God. He
was
really bored. It was time for him to go
back to his room and to bed so he could shit on himself, get back to normal.

But Jesus and Ra, this was different from what had been
going on up until now! It might all be bullshit, but considering what was going
on in his life right now, it was absorbing bullshit. It might be worth playing
the game to the hilt, even if he was playing it with a black guy who thought he
was John F. Kennedy and believed an Egyptian mummy was stalking the corridors of
Shady Rest Convalescent Home, writing graffiti on toilet stalls, sucking
people’s souls out through their assholes, digesting them, and crapping them
down the visitors’ toilet.

Suddenly Elvis was pulled out of his considerations. There
came from the hall the noise again. The sound that each time he heard it
reminded him of something different. This time it was dried corn husks being
rattled in a high wind. He felt goose bumps travel up his spine and the hairs
on the back of his neck and arms stood up. He leaned forward and put his hands
on his walker and pulled himself upright.

“Don’t go in the hall,” Jack said.

“I’m not asleep.”

“That doesn’t mean
it
won’t hurt you.”

“
It,
my ass, there isn’t any mummy from Egypt.”

“Nice knowing you, Elvis.”

Elvis inched the walker forward. He was halfway to the open
door when he spied the figure in the hallway.

As the thing came even with the doorway, the hall lights
went dim and sputtered. Twisting about the apparition, like pet crows, were
flutters of shadows. The thing walked and stumbled, shuffled and flowed. Its
legs moved like Elvis’s own, meaning not too good, and yet, there was something
about its locomotion that was impossible to identify. Stiff, but ghostly
smooth. It was dressed in nasty-looking jeans, a black shirt, a black cowboy
hat that came down so low it covered where the thing’s eyebrows should be. It
wore large cowboy boots with the toes curled up, and there came from the thing
a kind of mixed-stench: a compost pile of mud, rotting leaves, resin, spoiled
fruit, dry dust, and gassy sewage.

Elvis found that he couldn’t scoot ahead another inch. He
froze. The thing stopped and cautiously turned its head on its apple-stem neck and
looked at Elvis with empty eye sockets, revealing that it was, in fact, uglier
than Lyndon Johnson.

Surprisingly, Elvis found he was surging forward as if on a
zooming camera dolly, and that he was plunging into the thing’s right eye
socket, which swelled speedily to the dimensions of a vast canyon bottomed by
blackness.

Down Elvis went, spinning and spinning, and out of the
emptiness rushed resin-scented memories of pyramids and boats on a river, hot
blue skies, and a great silver bus lashed hard by black rain, a crumbling
bridge and a charge of dusky water and a gleam of silver. Then there was a
darkness so caliginous it was beyond being called dark, and Elvis could feel
and taste mud in his mouth and a sensation of claustrophobia beyond expression.
And he could perceive the thing’s hunger, a hunger that prodded him like hot
pins, and then—

—there came a
popping
sound in rapid succession, and
Elvis felt himself whirling even faster, spinning backwards out of that deep
memory canyon of the dusty head, and now he stood once again within the
framework of his walker, and the mummy—for Elvis no longer denied to himself
that it was such—turned its head away and began to move again, to shuffle, to
flow, to stumble, to glide, down the hall, its pet shadows screeching with
rusty throats around its head.

Pop! Pop! Pop!

As the thing moved on Elvis compelled himself to lift his
walker and advance into the hall. Jack slipped up beside him, and they saw the
mummy in cowboy clothes traveling toward the exit door at the back of the home.
When it came to the locked door, it leaned against where the door met the jamb
and twisted and writhed, squeezed through the invisible crack where the two
connected. Its shadows pursued it, as if sucked through by a vacuum cleaner.

The popping sound went on, and Elvis turned his head in that
direction, and there, in his mask, his double concho-studded holster belted
around his waist, was Kemosabe, a silver Fanner Fifty in either hand. He was
popping caps rapidly at where the mummy had departed, the black-spotted red
rolls flowing out from behind the hammers of his revolvers in smoky relay.

“Asshole!” Kemosabe said. “Asshole!”

And then Kemosabe quivered, dropped both hands, popped a cap
from each gun toward the ground, stiffened, collapsed.

Elvis knew he was dead of a ruptured heart before he hit the
black and white tile; gone down and out with both guns blazing, soul intact.

The hall lights trembled back to normal.

The administrators, the nurses and the aides came then. They
rolled Kemosabe over and drove their palms against his chest, but he didn’t
breathe again. No more Hi-Yo-Silver. They sighed over him and clucked their
tongues, and finally an aide reached over and lifted Kemosabe’s mask, pulled it
off his head and dropped it on the floor, nonchalantly, and without respect,
revealed his identity.

It was no one anyone really knew.

Once again, Elvis got scolded, and this time he got quizzed
about what had happened to Kemosabe, and so did Jack, but neither told the
truth. Who was going to believe a couple of nuts? Elvis and Jack Kennedy
explaining that Kemosabe was gunning for a mummy in cowboy duds, a Bubba Ho-Tep
with a flock of shadows roiling about his cowboy-hatted head?

So, what they did was lie.

“He came snapping caps and then he fell,” Elvis said, and
Jack corroborated his story, and when Kemosabe had been carried off, Elvis,
with some difficulty, using his walker for support, got down on his knee and
picked up the discarded mask and carried it away with him.

He had wanted the guns, but an aide had taken those for her
four-yearold son.

Later, he and Jack learned through the grapevine that
Kemosabe’s roommate, an eighty-year-old man who had been in a semi-comatose
condition for several years, had been found dead on the floor of his room. It
was assumed Kemosabe had lost it and dragged him off his bed and onto the floor
and the eighty-year-old man had kicked the bucket during the fall. As for
Kemosabe, they figured he had then gone nuts when he realized what he had done,
and had wandered out in the hall firing, and had a heart attack.

Elvis knew different. The mummy had come and Kemosabe had
tried to protect his roommate in the only way he knew how. But instead of
silver bullets, his gun smoked sulfur. Elvis felt a rush of pride in the old
fart.

He and Jack got together later, talked about what they had
seen, and then there was nothing left to say.

Night went away and the sun came up, and Elvis, who had
slept not a wink, came up with it and put on khaki pants and a khaki shirt and
used his walker to go outside. It had been ages since he had been out, and it
seemed strange out there, all that sunlight and the smells of flowers and the
Texas sky so high and the clouds so white.

It was hard to believe he had spent so much time in his bed.
Just the use of his legs with the walker these last few days had tightened the
muscles, and he found he could get around better.

The pretty nurse with the grapefruit tits came outside and
said: “Mr. Presley, you look so much stronger. But you shouldn’t stay out too
long. It’s almost time for a nap and for us, to, you know . . .”

“Fuck off, you patronizing bitch,” said Elvis. “I’m tired of
your shit. I’ll lube my own transmission. You treat me like a baby again, I’ll
wrap this goddamn walker around your head.”

The pretty nurse stood stunned, then went away quietly.

Elvis inched his way with the walker around the great
circular drive that surrounded the home. It was a half hour later when he
reached the back of the home and the door through which the mummy had departed.
It was still locked, and he stood and looked at it amazed. How in hell had the
mummy done that, slipping through an indiscernible chink between door and
frame?

Elvis looked down at the concrete that lay at the back of
the door.

No clues there. He used the walker to travel toward the
growth of trees out back, a growth of pin-oaks and sweet gums and hickory nut
trees that shouldered on either side of the large creek that flowed behind the
home.

The ground tipped sharply there, and for a moment he
hesitated, then reconsidered.
Well, what the fuck?
he thought.

He planted the walker and started going forward, the ground
sloping ever more dramatically. By the time he reached the bank of the creek
and came to a gap in the trees, he was exhausted. He had the urge to start
yelling for help, but didn’t want to belittle himself, not after his
performance with the nurse. He knew that he had regained some of his former
confidence. His cursing and abuse had not seemed cute to her that time. The
words had bitten her, if only slightly, Truth was, he was going to miss her
greasing his pecker.

He looked over the bank of the creek. It was quite a drop
there. The creek itself was narrow, and on either side of it was a
gravel-littered six feet of shore. To his left, where the creek ran beneath a
bridge, he could see where a mass of weeds and mud had gathered over time, and
he could see something shiny in their midst.

Elvis eased to the ground inside his walker and sat there
and looked at the water churning along. A huge woodpecker laughed in a tree
nearby and a jay yelled at a smaller bird to leave his territory.

Where had ole Bubba Ho-Tep gone? Where did he come from? How
in hell did he get here?

He recalled what he had seen inside the mummy’s mind. The
silver bus, the rain, the shattered bridge, the wash of water and mud.

Well, now, wait a minute, he thought. Here we have water and
mud and a bridge, though it’s not broken, and there’s something shiny in the
midst of all those leaves and limbs and collected debris. All these items were
elements of what he had seen in Bubba Ho-Tep’s head. Obviously there was a
connection.

But what was it?

When he got his strength back, Elvis pulled himself up and
got the walker turned, and worked his way back to the home. He was covered in
sweat and stiff as wire by the time he reached his room and tugged himself into
bed. The blister on his dick throbbed and he unfastened his pants and eased
down his underwear. The blister had refilled with pus, and it looked nastier
than usual.

It’s a cancer, he determined. He made the conclusion in a
certain final rush. They’re keeping it from me because I’m old and to them it
doesn’t matter. They think age will kill me first, and they are probably right.

Well, fuck them. I know what it is, and if it isn’t, it
might as well be
.

He got the salve and doctored the pus-filled lesion, and put
the salve away, and pulled up his underwear and pants, and fastened his belt.

Elvis got his TV remote off the dresser and clicked it on
while he waited for lunch. As he ran the channels, he hit upon an advertisement
for Elvis Presley week. It startled him. It wasn’t the first time it had
happened, but at the moment it struck him hard. It showed clips from his
movies,
Clambake, Roustabout,
several others. All shit movies. Here he
was complaining about loss of pride and how life had treated him, and now he
realized he’d never had any pride and much of how life had treated him had been
quite good, and the bulk of the bad had been his own fault. He wished now he’d
fired his manager, Colonel Parker, about the time he got into films. The old
fart had been a fool, and he had been a bigger fool for following him. He
wished too he had treated Priscilla right. He wished he could tell his daughter
he loved her.

Always the questions. Never the answers. Always the hopes.
Never the fulfillments.

Elvis clicked off the set and dropped the remote on the
dresser just as Jack came into the room. He had a folder under his arm. He
looked like he was ready for a briefing at the White House.

“I had the woman who calls herself my niece come get me,” he
said. “She took me downtown to the newspaper morgue. She’s been helping me do
some research.”

“On what?” Elvis said.

“On our mummy.”

“You know something about him?” Elvis asked.

“I know plenty.”

Jack pulled a chair up next to the bed, and Elvis used the
bed’s lift button to raise his back and head so he could see what was in Jack’s
folder.

Jack opened the folder, took out some clippings, and laid
them on the bed. Elvis looked at them as Jack talked.

“One of the lesser mummies, on loan from the Egyptian
government, was being circulated across the United States. You know, museums,
that kind of stuff. It wasn’t a major exhibit, like the King Tut exhibit some
years back, but it was of interest. The mummy was flown or carried by train
from state to state. When it got to Texas, it was stolen.

“Evidence points to the fact that it was stolen at night by
a couple of guys in a silver bus. There was a witness. Some guy walking his dog
or something. Anyway, the thieves broke in the museum and stole it, hoping to
get a ransom probably. But in came the worst storm in East Texas history.
Tornadoes. Rain. Hail. You name it. Creeks and rivers overflowed. Mobile homes
were washed away. Livestock drowned. Maybe you remember it. . . . No matter. It
was one hell of a flood.

“These guys got away, and nothing was ever heard from them.
After you told me what you saw inside the mummy’s head—the silver bus, the
storm, the bridge, all that—I came up with a more interesting, and I believe,
considerably more accurate scenario.”