Joe Lansdale: The Best of Joe R. Lansdale

“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 Mideast. 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 Grove 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, and 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 out, and the lights that were on were dimmed to a watery egg yoke 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 Grove, 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 nut house?

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 grey. (“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.”