Joe Lansdale: The Best of Joe R. Lansdale

The young woman turned and looked at him, “I suppose,” she said. She went to the trashcan and bent over it and showed her black panties to Elvis as she rummaged. He knew the revealing of her panties was neither intentional or unintentional. She just didn’t give a damn. She saw him as so physically and sexually non-threatening, she didn’t mind if he got a bird’s-eye view of her; it was the same to her as a house cat sneaking a peek.

Elvis observed the thin panties straining and slipping into the caverns of her ass cheeks and felt his pecker flutter once, like a bird having a heart attack, then it laid down and remained limp and still.

Well, these days, even a flutter was kind of reassuring.

The woman surfaced from the trashcan with a photo and the Purple Heart, went over to Elvis’s bed and handed them to him.

Elvis dangled the ribbon that held the Purple Heart between his fingers, said, “Bull your kin?”

“My daddy,” she said.

“I haven’t seen you here before.”

“Only been here once before,” she said. “When I checked him in.”

“Oh,” Elvis said. “That was three years ago, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Were you and him friends?”

Elvis considered the question. He didn’t know the real answer. All he knew was Bull listened to him when he said he was Elvis Presley and seemed to believe him. If he didn’t believe him, he at least had the courtesy not to patronize. Bull always called him Elvis, and before Bull grew too ill, he always played cards and checkers with him.

“Just roommates,” Elvis said. “He didn’t feel good enough to say much. I just sort of hated to see what was left of him go away so easy. He was an all right guy. He mentioned you a lot. You’re Callie, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Well, he was all right.”

“Not enough you came and saw him though.”

“Don’t try to put some guilt trip on me, Mister. I did what I could. Hadn’t been for Medicaid, Medicare, whatever that stuff was, he’d have been in a ditch somewhere. I didn’t have the money to take care of him.”

Elvis thought of his own daughter, lost long ago to him. If she knew he lived, would she come to see him? Would she care? He feared knowing the answer.

“You could have come and seen him,” Elvis said.

“I was busy. Mind your own business. Hear?”

The chocolate-skin nurse with the grapefruit tits came in. Her white uniform crackled like cards being shuffled. Her little white nurse hat was tilted on her head in a way that said she loved mankind and made good money and was getting regular dick. She smiled at Callie and then at Elvis. “How are you this morning, Mr. Haff?”

“All right,” Elvis said. “But I prefer Mr. Presley. Or Elvis. I keep telling you that. I don’t go by Sebastian Haff anymore. I don’t try to hide anymore.”

“Why, of course,” said the pretty nurse. “I knew that. I forgot. Good morning, Elvis.”

Her voice dripped with sorghum syrup. Elvis wanted to hit her with his bed pan.

The nurse said to Callie: “Did you know we have a celebrity here, Miss Jones? Elvis Presley. You know, the rock and roll singer?”

“I’ve heard of him,” Callie said. “I thought he was dead.”

Callie went back to the dresser and squatted and set to work on the bottom drawer. The nurse looked at Elvis and smiled again, only she spoke to Callie. “Well, actually, Elvis is dead, and Mr. Haff knows that, don’t you, Mr. Haff?”

“Hell no,” said Elvis. “I’m right here. I ain’t dead, yet.”

“Now, Mr. Haff, I don’t mind calling you Elvis, but you’re a little confused, or like to play sometimes. You were an Elvis impersonator. Remember? You fell off a stage and broke your hip. What was it…Twenty years ago? It got infected and you went into a coma for a few years. You came out with a few problems.”

“I was impersonating myself,” Elvis said. “I couldn’t do nothing else. I haven’t got any problems. You’re trying to say my brain is messed up, aren’t you?”

Callie quit cleaning out the bottom drawer of the dresser. She was interested now, and though it was no use, Elvis couldn’t help but try and explain who he was, just one more time. The explaining had become a habit, like wanting to smoke a cigar long after the enjoyment of it was gone.

“I got tired of it all,” he said. “I got on drugs, you know. I wanted out. Fella named Sebastian Haff, an Elvis imitator, the best of them. He took my place. He had a bad heart and he liked drugs, too. It was him died, not me. I took his place.”

“Why would you want to leave all that fame,” Callie said, “all that money?” and she looked at the nurse, like Let’s humor the old fart for a lark .

“‘Cause it got old. Woman I loved, Priscilla, she was gone. Rest of the women…were just women. The music wasn’t mine anymore. I wasn’t even me anymore. I was this thing they made up. Friends were sucking me dry. I got away and liked it, left all the money with Sebastian, except for enough to sustain me if things got bad. We had a deal, me and Sebastian. When I wanted to come back, he’d let me. It was all written up in a contract in case he wanted to give me a hard time, got to liking my life too good. Thing was, copy of the contract I had got lost in a trailer fire. I was living simple. Way Haff had been. Going from town to town doing the Elvis act. Only I felt like I was really me again. Can you dig that?”

“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.