But, at this moment, sitting in the Cafe con Pep Moso in the middle of the Mexican tropics, the last thing in the world that Elvis wanted to do was perform. No, right now, listening to the Spanish music, breathing in the flower- and food-scented air, watching the two lovers meld into one another's arms, Elvis was simply a Watcher and a Listener. Not putting anything
out
, just taking everything
in
. And, O Lord, what a pleasure that was.
“Mr. Clifford tells me that you are a twin also,” Garcia was saying.
“That's right,” Elvis replied, turning to his table mate. “But my twin, Jesse Garon, he died when we were born.”
“Yes, I understand,” Garcia said. “You are the exceptions, you know. Identical twins have exactly the same DNA. The same genetic blueprint, the same genetic fingerprint.”
Elvis nodded and looked back at the dancers, but something was tugging at his mind, that half-formed embryo of a question that had skittered across his consciousness just before he fell asleep the other night.
“Dr. Garcia, how much do twins have to do with each other whenâyou knowâwhen they are still inside their mom?”
“A great deal, in my opinion,” Garcia said seriously. “Especially in the third trimester when they are very close to being fully-formed human beings. They are locked together in the same little space for every second of every day. Always touching. When one moves, the other must move also. It would be impossible for them not to be aware of each other. In fact, I would say that there is nothing else that they
are
aware of.”
“So I knew Jesse,” Elvis said, looking deeply into Garcia's eyes. “I knew he was there.”
“In some way, yes,” Garcia said. “But we cannot begin to understand what that way could be. What an unborn child's consciousness is like. I imagine it is a murky thing, that he does not really know where his body ends and the other body begins. Perhaps the unborn child has that consciousness that holy men seekâwhere all things are one thing.”
“But I knew he was there,” Elvis repeated anxiously. “I probably even had feelings about him.”
“Perhaps,” Garcia said.
“Unconscious feelings?” Elvis asked softly, his heart beating rapidly.
Hector Garcia studied Elvis with his shinning black eyes for several moments before he responded.
“You had absolutely nothing to do with your twin's premature
death, Mr. Presley,” he said quietly. “I can assure you of that.”
“But there are no accidents, are there?” Elvis said.
“I am a scientist,” Garcia said. “And in my opinion, there is nothing in the universe
but
accidents.”
Peace in the Valley
T
hey were in the air, jetting out of Durango the next morning, before Elvis brought up the subject of Dr. Dolores Suarez.
“You serious about this woman, Regis?”
Regis gazed out at the clouds for a moment.
“Or it's just a dream,” he said.
“Well, I was there and it didn't look like a dream to me,” Elvis said, grinning. “I never seen anything quite like it. You were dancing to the same music the minute you laid eyes on each other.”
“That's the truth,” Regis said. “It doesn't make any sense, but it's the truth.”
“I'm real happy for you, Regis,” Elvis said.
“Thank you, Elvis,” Regis said. He again looked out the airplane window for a moment, then, “I owe it all to you, you know. My whole life seems to have spun around a hundred and eighty degrees since you walked into my office.”
Just another accident
, Elvis thought, but he didn't say anything. A stewardess leaned over their seats. “May I get you something to drink, senors?” she asked.
“No, thank you, ma'am,” Elvis said.
Regis hesitated, biting down on his lip. “Okay,” he said finally. “A tequila sunrise, if you don't mind.” But as the stewardess walked on, he looked earnestly into Elvis's face and said, “It's my last drink, you know. That part of my life is over too.”
“Glad to hear that, Regis.”
Elvis didn't stay awake long enough to see if Regis actually did limit himself to a single tequila sunrise; he slipped the other half of the painkiller into his mouth and slept all the way to L.A. At the airport, Elvis stuffed another three-day advance into Regis's pocket and gave him Dr. Garcia's cell-gathering kit for safekeeping. Regis said he would get to work on the Holly McDougal safety deposit box problem immediately, then jumped into a cab. Elvis got behind the wheel of his Eldorado and headed west for Nevada.
The Sparks Harvest Festival and Rodeo was winding down its last day by the time Elvis arrived that evening. In the parking area, trailers were loading up with horses and cattle, and men and women in coveralls were wrestling game stalls and dismantled fair rides onto flatbeds. All the carnival gizmos and rodeo paraphernalia and wiry bodies reminded Elvis of the stunt shack on the MGM lot; it sure seemed a natural thing to pop back and forth between those two worlds.
But busy as everybody at the Sparks Rodeo was, they all stopped and stared the moment Elvis got out of his car and braced his crutches under his shoulders. For a long moment, the parking lot went hushed as a prairie, and then one of the young men in overalls yodeled out, “Whoopee! It's Elvis!” and soon they were all cheering and yelling and surging toward him with big happy grins on their faces. Elvis smiled back at them, feeling gratified and more than a little wistful. Man, he hadn't been at a rodeo or county fair since the old days when he did fairground shows with Jimmie Rogers Snow in Lubbock and Rosewell and Bastrop. This here was a long way from Hollywoodâor Vegas, for that matter. Elvis felt a real and instant connection with these folks.
“What brings you to Sparks, Elvis?” the yodeler asked, slapping Elvis on the shoulder.
“I come to pay my respects to Will Cathcart,” Elvis replied. His response filtered back through the crowd in a rolling murmur.
“Awful thing,” one of the coveralled young women said. “'Specially for his widow and young 'uns.”
“That it is,” Elvis said. “She here?”
“Yup, that's her over by the bandstand,” the young woman said, pointing. “They're puttin' together a benefit, you know. A little butter and egg money to get 'em started on their own.”
Squinting, Elvis saw a sandy-haired girl in a white cotton dress that bulged out at the belly. She didn't look more than seventeen or eighteen. On either side of her, grasping at her skirts, were towheaded toddlers.
“That why you're here, Elvis?” someone asked. “For the benefit?”
Elvis looked out at the crowd that now completely encircled him, and they looked back at him with one bright and honest expectant face. It was only an accident that he was here at this exact moment, but maybe that was the deal with accidents: you had to know what to do with them.
“Yes,” Elvis said. “That's why I'm here.”
The entire group streamed toward the bandstand with Elvis limping at its center. Along the way, others attached themselves in twos and threes, and by the time they reached Will's widow, Jilly-Jo Cathcart, their number had doubled. The swarm parted to let Jilly-Jo and her two children in. All three of them looked as if they had been doing more crying than breathing in the last couple of days.
“I'm very sorry for you, ma'am,” Elvis said, offering Jilly-Jo his hand.
“Kind of you,” the young woman answered in a whisper, her eyes cast down. She only touched Elvis's hand for a second, then pulled it away and set it back on the shoulder of her youngest.
“I just made Will's acquaintance a few days back,” Elvis went on. “But he struck me as a fine young man.”
“Will told me 'bout that,” Jilly-Jo said. “He was sorry, you knowâ” She gestured with her head at Elvis's ankle.
“No matter at all,” Elvis said. “He was not to blame.”
“'Course not,” she said. “It was Mickey. He runs the show.”
“Mickey Grieves?”
Jilly-Jo leaned her head close to Elvis's ear. “He's a bad man, Mr. Presley, and I done told him so to his face. Day before yesterday.”
“He was here, at Sparks?”
The young woman nodded.
“Ma'am, was he here
before
Will's accident?” Elvis asked urgently.
“Yes,” she whispered, looking as if she was about to cry again.
Above them, on the bandstand, two young men were tuning up their electric guitars. Between them, an older guy with a bandana wrapped around his head was adjusting his electric fiddle and behind him was a rail-thin girl in a denim shirt and overalls bracing a standing bass against her shoulder. At the edge of the crowd, a cheer went up. Cars and pickups and even one big old school bus were suddenly streaming in from every which direction, kicking up clouds of dust, their windows open and people shouting out through them. “Elvis!” echoed from the vehicles to the bandstand crowd and back again. The word was out in Sparks, Nevada.
Elvis asked Jilly-Jo if they could talk again later, then limped his way to the bandstand steps. Two young roustabouts appeared on either side of Elvis; someone took his crutches and then the two young men made a four-handed seat, carried him to center stage, and set him down on a high-standing stool behind a microphone. The roar that greeted him was about as thunderous and joyful as any he'd heard. Elvis bowed his head and held it down for several minutes.
When the din finally quieted, Elvis raised his head, looked out and smiled. The entire fairgrounds was packed, virtually all the people standing, their faces turned up to him. Behind him, the fiddle player murmured, “More folks than we've had here three days runnin'.” Elvis motioned to him, whispered something in his ear, then turned back to the audience.
“This here is for Will and Jilly-Jo,” he said into the microphone.
The fiddler sawed off a plaintive introduction and then Elvis stood
up straight and began to sing “Love Me Tender.” Behind him, the bass joined in on the beat after “Never let me go,” followed by the two guitars at the end of the first verse.
It had been awhile since Elvis had sung the song, but it came out of him with more genuine feeling than he could remember ever giving it. Something was stirring inside of himâan awful ache for this dear young widow child and the awkward young man who was lost to her foreverâand it found its way into the heart of his voice. By the time he reached, “I'll be yours through all the years, till the end of time,” there were tears rolling down Elvis's cheeks. The fiddler closed with a minor-key reprise of his intro and then, for several seconds, the only sound that could be heard at the Sparks Harvest Festival and Rodeo were the sniffles and swallows of the assembled guests. Someone finally broke the silence with a soft hand clap, another joined in, then another, and finally the whole field from the bandstand to the stables to the empty, revolving Ferris wheel was clapping loud and long and steady. Not a voice was raised; this was the applause of deep and humble respect.
“There are going to be hats passing among you,” Elvis finally said into the microphone. “You know what to do, folks.”
Immediately, upturned Stetson hats began radiating from the front row out into the crowd. Elvis conferred with the fiddler again, then asked one of the guitarists if he could borrow his Fender for the next number.
“Thank you, thank you very much,” Elvis said. “This next one I want to dedicate to my friend Regis Clifford and his woman, Delores Suarez. She's a doctor, folks. My friend Regis has landed himself a doctor.”
A ripple of giggles went through the crowd and then they went quiet as Elvis launched into “Young Dreams.” Again, the song came out of him pure as honey, as he thought about Regis and Delores pushing into their forties but with a sudden love as young as any twenty-year-old's. God, it was a pleasure to sing from the heart again.
The crowd roared, the Stetsons came back front chock full of paper money, somebody emptied the hats into a barrel, and out they went again as Elvis came to the microphone for the next song, “Teddy Bear.”
“I dedicate this one to my best buddy, Billy Jackson. Looks like a nice woman has taken a fancy to him. Love is alive and well, folks, thank the Lord!”
As Elvis came to, “I don't wanna be a tiger/'Cause tigers play too rough,” he pantomimed a tiger clawing at the air, his hips doing a slithery jungle thing. The crowd laughed and started clapping rhythmically right through, “I don't wanna be a lion/'Cause lions ain't the kind you love enough.” The fact that Elvis was bouncing around on his sprained ankle did not even occur to him. He was having too much fun.
When he dedicated the next song, “Jailhouse Rock,” to Squirm Littlejon, “an innocent man who's doing time for being at the wrong place at the wrong time,” many people in the audience kind of gasped, while others let out a cheer of “Squirm!” Rodeo folks, at least, hadn't forgotten about the case of Squirm Littlejon.
By the end of this number, the barrel was pretty much full and somebody rolled out another one as the hats went out again. Elvis conferred with the fiddler and came back to the microphone.
“This here is my last one, friends,” he said. “And I'm sending it out to every man and woman who ever lost a loved one. It's the heartbreak that never heals, folks.
Never
. So this one is to the memory of Will Cathcart ⦠andâ” Elvis stopped and swallowed hard. “And it's to the memory of Miss Selma DuPres.”
The fiddler jumped right in with the intro to “There Will Be Peace in the Valley for Me” and once again Elvis found himself singing the truth in the song, the heart at its center.
Oh well, I'm tired and so weary
But I must go alone
Till the Lord comes and calls, calls me away, oh yes
Well the morning's so bright
And the lamp is alight
And the night, night is as black as the sea, oh yes
As he sang on, Elvis's mind jumped from an image of that moment when he witnessed Regis and Delores falling in love to the sound of Connie Spinelli's voice when she asked if Billy was married, and from there to the sadness in Jilly-Jo Cathcart's eyes and then to Selma's warm smile as she led him into her bedroom in Alamo, Tennessee. God, yes, love was alive and well, and even if his heart was breaking, it was fullâyes, full of love. But as he came to the reprise, he realized that not once had an image of Priscilla come to him. Or of Ann-Margret. In fact, he had not thought about either of them in days.
There will be peace in the valley for me, some day
There will be peace in the valley for me, oh Lord I pray
There'll be no sadness, no sorrow
No trouble, trouble I see
There will be peace in the valley for me, for me
In front of the bandstand, folks were now moving on in an orderly file from left to right, digging deep into their pockets and handbags and tossing even more money into the barrels, then looking up at Elvis and smiling and saluting before continuing out to the parking lot. For a long, soulful moment, Elvis was back at Ray Kaserne in Friedberg, Germany, singing “Silent Night” to the enlisted men setting off on Christmas leave, and the love he felt in his heart surged out to every man, woman, and child passing in front of him. Yes, for one long wonder-filled moment, Elvis once again remembered exactly why it was that he had always wanted to be a singer.
The total in the barrels came to $1,273 and Elvis added a check for $3,727, “just to make it come out even,” as he said to Jilly-Jo Cathcart after the concert was over. They talked a bit longer, but
she had nothing more to add about Mickey Grieves, and she told Elvis that Will had never mentioned anything to her about a Holly McDougal or Squirm Littlejon. She had no idea what it was that Will had intended to tell Elvis once he got back from the rodeo. Finally, Jilly-Jo said that Will's funeral was out in Maywood tomorrow at eleven and Elvis was welcome to come.