Stories (2011) (71 page)

“Let me guess. The bus got washed away. I think I saw it
today. Right out back in the creek. It must have washed up there years ago.”

“That confirms it. The bridge you saw breaking, that’s how
the bus got in the water, which would have been as deep then as a raging river.
The bus was carried downstream. It lodged somewhere nearby, and the mummy was
imprisoned by debris, and recently it worked its way loose.”

“But how did it come alive?” Elvis asked. “And how did I end
up inside its memories?”

“The speculation is broader here, but from what I’ve read,
sometimes mummies were buried without their names, a curse put on their
sarcophagus, or coffin, if you will. My guess is our guy was one of those.
While he was in the coffin, he was a drying corpse. But when the bus was washed
off the road, the coffin was overturned, or broken open, and our boy was freed
of coffin and curse. Or more likely, it rotted open in time, and the holding
spell was broken. And think about him down there all that time, waiting for
freedom, alive, but not alive. Hungry, and no way to feed. I said he was free
of his curse, but that’s not entirely true. He’s free of his imprisonment, but
he still needs souls.

“And now, he’s free to have them, and he’ll keep feeding
unless he’s finally destroyed. . . . You know, I think there’s a part of him,
oddly enough, that wants to fit in. To be human again. He doesn’t entirely know
what he’s become. He responds to some old desires and the new desires of his
condition. That’s why he’s taken on the illusion of clothes, probably copying
the dress of one of his victims.

“The souls give him strength. Increase his spectral powers.
One of which was to hypnotize you, kinda, draw you inside his head. He couldn’t
steal your soul that way, you have to be unconscious to have that done to you,
but he could weaken you, distract you.”

“And those shadows around him?”

“His guardians. They warn him. They have some limited powers
of their own. I’ve read about them in the
Everyday Man or Woman’s Book of
the Soul.
”

“What do we do?” Elvis said.

“I think changing rest homes would be a good idea,” Jack
said. “I can’t think of much else. I will say this. Our mummy is a nighttime
kind of guy. 3 A.M., actually. So, I’m going to sleep now, and again after
lunch. Set my alarm for before dark so I can fix myself a couple cups of
coffee. He comes tonight, I don’t want him slapping his lips over my asshole
again. I think he heard you coming down the hall about the time he got started
on me the other night, and he ran. Not because he was scared, but because he
didn’t want anyone to find out he’s around. Consider it. He has the proverbial
bird’s nest on the ground here.”

After Jack left, Elvis decided he should follow Jack’s lead and
nap. Of course, at his age, he napped a lot anyway, and could fall asleep at
any time, or toss restlessly for hours. There was no rhyme or reason to it.

He nestled his head into his pillow and tried to sleep, but
sleep wouldn’t come. Instead, he thought about things. Like, what did he really
have left in life but this place? It wasn’t much of a home, but it was all he
had, and he’d be damned if he’d let a foreign, graffiti-writing, soul-sucking
sonofabitch in an oversized hat and cowboy boots (with elf toes) take away his
family members’ souls and shit them down the visitors’ toilet.

In the movies he had always played heroic types. But when
the stage lights went out, it was time for drugs and stupidity and the coveting
of women. Now it was time to be a little of what he had always fantasized
being.

A hero.

Elvis leaned over and got hold of his telephone and dialed
Jack’s room. “Mr. Kennedy,” Elvis said when Jack answered. “Ask not what your
rest home can do for you. Ask what you can do for your rest home.”

“Hey, you’re copping my best lines,” Jack said.

“Well, then, to paraphrase one of my own, ‘Let’s take care
of business.’”

“What are you getting at?”

“You know what I’m getting at. We’re gonna kill a mummy.”

The sun, like a boil on the bright blue ass of day, rolled
gradually forward and spread its legs wide to reveal the pubic thatch of night,
a hairy darkness in which stars crawled like lice, and the moon crabbed slowly
upward like an albino dog tick thriving for the anal gulch.

During this slow-rolling transition, Elvis and Jack
discussed their plans, then they slept a little, ate their lunch of boiled
cabbage and meatloaf, slept some more, ate a supper of white bread and
asparagus and a helping of shit on a shingle without the shingle, slept again,
awoke about the time the pubic thatch appeared and those starry lice began to
crawl.

And even then, with night about them, they had to wait until
midnight to do what they had to do.

Jack squinted through his glasses and examined his list.
“Two bottles of rubbing alcohol?” Jack said.

“Check,” said Elvis. “And we won’t have to toss it. Look
here.” Elvis held up a paint sprayer. “I found this in the storage room.”

“I thought they kept it locked,” Jack said.

“They do. But I stole a hairpin from Dillinger and picked
the lock.”

“Great!” Jack said. “Matches?”

“Check. I also scrounged a cigarette lighter.”

“Good. Uniforms?”

Elvis held up his white suit, slightly grayed in spots with
a chili stain on the front. A white silk scarf and the big gold and silver and
ruby-studded belt that went with the outfit lay on the bed. There were zippered
boots from K-Mart. “Check.”

Jack held up a gray business suit on a hanger. “I’ve got
some nice shoes and a tie to go with it in my room.”

“Check,” Elvis said.

“Scissors?”

“Check.”

“I’ve got my motorized wheelchair oiled and ready to roll,”
Jack said, “and I’ve looked up a few words of power in one of my magic books. I
don’t know if they’ll stop a mummy, but they’re supposed to ward off evil. I
wrote them down on a piece of paper.”

“We use what we got,” Elvis said. “Well, then. Two
forty-five out back of the place.”

“Considering our rate of travel, better start moving about
two-thirty,” Jack said.

“Jack,” Elvis asked. “Do we know what we’re doing?”

“No, but they say fire cleanses evil. Let’s hope they,
whoever they are, is right.”

“Check on that too,” said Elvis. “Synchronize watches.”

They did, and Elvis added: “Remember. The key words for
tonight are Caution and Flammable. And Watch Your Ass.”

The front door had an alarm system, but it was easily
manipulated from the inside. Once Elvis had the wires cut with the scissors,
they pushed the compression lever on the door, and Jack shoved his wheelchair
outside, and held the door while Elvis worked his walker through. Elvis tossed
the scissors into the shrubbery, and Jack jammed a paperback book between the
doors to allow them re-entry, should re-entry be an option at a later date.

Elvis was wearing a large pair of glasses with multicolored
gem-studded chocolate frames and his stained white jumpsuit with scarf and belt
and zippered boots. The suit was open at the front and hung loose on him,
except at the belly. To make it even tighter there, Elvis had made up a
medicine bag of sorts, and stuffed it inside his jumpsuit. The bag contained
Kemosabe’s mask, Bull’s purple heart, and the newspaper clipping where he had
first read of his alleged death.

Jack had on his gray business suit with a
black-and-red-striped tie knotted carefully at the throat, sensible black
shoes, and black nylon socks. The suit fit him well. He looked like a former
president.

In the seat of the wheelchair was the paint sprayer, filled
with rubbing alcohol, and beside it, a cigarette lighter and a paper folder of
matches. Jack handed Elvis the paint sprayer. A strap made of a strip of torn
sheet had been added to the device. Elvis hung the sprayer over his shoulder,
reached inside his belt and got out a flattened, half-smoked stogie he had been
saving for a special occasion. An occasion he had begun to think would never
arrive. He clenched the cigar between his teeth, picked the matches from the
seat of the wheelchair, and lit his cigar. It tasted like a dog turd, but he
puffed it anyway. He tossed the folder of matches back on the chair and looked
at Jack, said, “Let’s do it, amigo.”

Jack put the matches and the lighter in his suit pocket. He
sat down in the wheelchair, kicked the foot stanchions into place and rested
his feet on them. He leaned back slightly and flicked a switch on the arm rest.
The electric motor hummed, the chair eased forward.

“Meet you there,” said Jack. He rolled down the concrete
ramp, on out to the circular drive, and disappeared around the edge of the
building.

Elvis looked at his watch. It was nearly two forty-five. He
had to hump it. He clenched both hands on the walker and started truckin’.

Fifteen exhaustive minutes later, out back, Elvis settled in
against the door, the place where Bubba Ho-Tep had been entering and exiting.
The shadows fell over him like an umbrella. He propped the paint gun across the
walker and used his scarf to wipe the sweat off his forehead.

In the old days, after a performance, he’d wipe his face
with it and toss it to some woman in the crowd, watch as she creamed on
herself. Panties and hotel keys would fly onto the stage at that point,
bouquets of roses.

Tonight, he hoped Bubba Ho-Tep didn’t use the scarf to wipe
his ass after shitting him down the crapper.

Elvis looked where the circular concrete drive rose up
slightly to the right, and there, seated in the wheelchair, very patient and
still, was Jack. The moonlight spread over Jack and made him look like a
concrete yard gnome.

Apprehension spread over Elvis like a dose of the measles.
He thought:

Bubba Ho-Tep comes out of that creek bed, he’s going to
come out hungry and pissed, and when I try to stop him, he’s going to jam this
paint gun up my ass, then jam me and that wheelchair up Jack’s ass.

He puffed his cigar so fast it made him dizzy. He looked out
at the creek bank, and where the trees gaped wide, a figure rose up like a
cloud of termites, scrabbled like a crab, flowed like water, chunked and
chinked like a mass of oilfield tools tumbling downhill.

Its eyeless sockets trapped the moonlight and held it
momentarily before permitting it to pass through and out the back of its head
in irregular gold beams. The figure that simultaneously gave the impression of
shambling and gliding appeared one moment as nothing more than a shadow
surrounded by more active shadows, then it was a heap of twisted brown sticks
and dried mud molded into the shape of a human being, and in another moment, it
was a cowboy-hatted, booted thing taking each step as if it were its last.

Halfway to the rest home it spotted Elvis, standing in the
dark framework of the door. Elvis felt his bowels go loose, but he determined
not to shit his only good stage suit. His knees clacked together like stalks of
ribbon cane rattling in a high wind. The dog-turd cigar fell from his lips.

He picked up the paint gun and made sure it was ready to
spray. He pushed the butt of it into his hip and waited.

Bubba Ho-Tep didn’t move. He had ceased to come forward.
Elvis began to sweat more than before. His face and chest and balls were
soaked. If Bubba Ho-Tep didn’t come forward, their plan was fucked. They had to
get him in range of the paint sprayer. The idea was he’d soak him with the
alcohol, and Jack would come wheeling down from behind, flipping matches or the
lighter at Bubba, catching him on fire.

Elvis said softly, “Come and get it, you dead piece of
shit.”

Jack had nodded off for a moment, but now he came awake. His
flesh was tingling. It felt as if tiny ball bearings were being rolled beneath
his skin. He looked up and saw Bubba Ho-Tep paused between the creek bank,
himself, and Elvis at the door.

Jack took a deep breath. This was not the way they had
planned it. The mummy was supposed to go for Elvis because he was blocking the
door. But, no soap.

Jack got the matches and the cigarette lighter out of his
coat pocket and put them between his legs on the seat of the chair. He put his
hand on the gear box of the wheelchair, gunned it forward. He had to make
things happen; had to get Bubba Ho-Tep to follow him, come within range of
Elvis’s spray gun.

Bubba Ho-Tep stuck out his arm and clotheslined Jack
Kennedy. There was a sound like a rifle crack (no question, Warren Commission,
this blow was from the front), and over went the chair, and out went Jack,
flipping and sliding across the driveway, the cement tearing his suit knees
open, gnawing into his hide. The chair, minus its rider, tumbled over and came
upright, and still rolling, veered downhill toward Elvis in the doorway,
leaning on his walker, spray gun in hand.

The wheelchair hit Elvis’s walker. Elvis bounced against the
door, popped forward, grabbed the walker just in time, but dropped his spray
gun.

He glanced up to see Bubba Ho-Tep leaning over the
unconscious Jack. Bubba Ho-Tep’s mouth went wide, and wider yet, and became a
black toothless vacuum that throbbed pink as a raw wound in the moonlight; then
Bubba Ho-Tep turned his head and the pink was not visible. Bubba Ho-Tep’s mouth
went down over Jack’s face, and as Bubba Ho-Tep sucked, the shadows about it
thrashed and gobbled like turkeys.

Elvis used the walker to allow him to bend down and get hold
of the paint gun. When he came up with it, he tossed the walker aside, eased
himself around, and into the wheelchair. He found the matches and the lighter
there. Jack had done what he had done to distract Bubba Ho-Tep, to try and
bring him down closer to the door. But he had failed. Yet by accident, he had
provided Elvis with the instruments of mummy destruction, and now it was up to
him to do what he and Jack had hoped to do together. Elvis put the matches
inside his open-chested outfit, pushed the lighter tight under his ass.