Authors: Micah Nathan
Frank, the oldest member of Hell’s Foster Children, shook his head and crossed his thick arms over his chest. His tattoos were faded, lost amid graying forearm hair. “Bullshit. The man pours his heart out onstage and you’re telling me he loses to some yuppie because of Roxanne’s
rules
?”
Darryl spoke to Ben while the others continued their argument.
“Where did you say you were from?”
“Cheektowaga,” Ben said. “It’s near Buffalo.”
“I take it you two are headed to Little Valley.”
“Where?”
Darryl grinned. “Little Valley, Tennessee. For the Elvis Tribute Contest. My wife and I are big fans. I know a pro when I see it. He doesn’t really look like him, but he owned that stage. I mean, he
owned
it. I closed my eyes and could’ve sworn it was the King.”
Darryl glanced over his shoulder at Myra, who sat near the old man with an ice pack pressed to his temple. The old man’s eyes were closed. He looked asleep.
“So, listen.” Darryl lowered his voice and leaned forward with his hands clenched together, elbows resting on his knees. “You and the old man should come with us to Little Valley. We’re making a vacation out of it, Myra and me, maybe a few of the boys and their wives. We know all the good ’cue joints between here and there, and a couple places with the kind of women you’ll tell stories about in your old age. It wouldn’t be a lonely trip, know what I mean? What I’m trying to say is you’ll get laid. We got all sorts—blond cuties with pigtails and cutoffs, long-haired brunettes with nails that’ll claw the hair off your back, pierced chicks, shaved chicks, chicks with tats, fighting chicks, drinking chicks, chicks with limps and harelips—”
Ben shook his head. “I don’t think we can make the detour. The old man is determined to get to Memphis.”
Darryl grinned. “Of course he is. I guess you two are headed to Graceland.”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Ben said.
* * *
The last time Ben saw Jessica, he knew it was over because she brought her best friend, Mindy, to their weekly lunch at Rigoletto’s, an Italian bistro in the Palisade Mall with wall paintings of grape vines crawling across a sunlit field. Mindy was a doe-eyed girl with a nice laugh and a permanent ponytail, and she and Jess kept exchanging looks as if Ben didn’t notice. They finished lunch and Mindy went to the restroom. Jessica started chewing her thumbnail. Ben fished ice from the bottom of his glass.
He crunched a cube. “Just say it.”
“Say what?”
“Come on. I already know.”
“Okay. It’s over.”
“Hold on. I didn’t mean—”
“I’m so relieved.” She smiled. “I thought for sure you’d freak.”
“I am freaked.”
“You don’t look freaked.”
“I’m freaked, Jess. Trust me.”
“Well, whatever. I’ve said it and that’s what I wanted to say, and I’m sorry for doing this in public, but I just thought you’d go crazy.”
He lowered his voice. “You’re seeing someone else.”
“Please. I’m leaving for college in a month.”
“Then wait a month.”
“What’s the point?”
Ben thought for a moment. “I don’t know.”
Jessica nodded as if to say,
Exactly
. Then she peered over her shoulder. “Here comes Mindy. Please don’t put her in an awkward spot, okay?”
Mindy sat down and smiled politely. She and Jess exchanged another look—Ben realized they’d had it all planned from the start—and Mindy said, as if on cue:
“We should probably get going. It’s my dad’s birthday and I want to get him a tie at Harold’s.”
“What kind of tie?” Ben said.
“Silk.”
“Italian?”
“Um, sure.”
“Great,” Ben said. “I’ll join you. I worked at Harold’s last summer.”
He followed them to Harold’s, to a sporting goods store where they bought a six-pack of socks, then to a soft-pretzel kiosk and a coffee shop. As they sat in the food court, drinking from paper cups and watching old people shuffle past, Mindy’s cell chirped and she walked away.
Jessica grabbed Ben’s arm. “What are you doing?”
“Enjoying my day.”
“You’re not going to change my mind.”
“I know. But since this is our last date—”
“It’s not a date.” She let go of his arm and sat back in her chair, arms crossed, chin lowered. “Mindy thought you were really rude to our waiter at lunch.”
“I hate the waiters at Rigoletto’s. They always flirt with you.”
“I don’t even care, Ben. I really don’t. You want to know why I dumped you? Because you always get like this.”
“Like what? Pissed because some waiter is flirting with my girlfriend?”
“No. Like you’re
desperate
. Like I’m the only thing you have going on, and now that it’s over—”
“But I am desperate. I don’t want this to end, so if I’m having a difficult time with it, just be patient. This is how it works, anyway.”
Jessica rolled her eyes. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“I guess I’ve always been desperate,” Ben said, and he sipped his coffee. “Even when we first started dating. I knew this would happen, you know. Not
quite
like this …” Ben nodded toward the legions of mall walkers and moms with strollers. “But I’ve been waiting for this day. If that makes me weird—”
“It makes you pathetic.”
Ben said nothing. He finished his coffee with a gulp and crumpled the cup. Then he walked away, hands in his pockets. On the way to the main concourse, he pulled Mindy aside. She covered her cell and frowned at him.
“I’ve always had a thing for you,” he said. “Meet me tonight for dinner.”
“What?”
“I know I was rude to our waiter but that’s not who I am. They always flirt with Jessica—”
“
Gross,
” Mindy said. She yanked her arm from his grip and walked back to the table.
This is self-destruction at its most refined, Ben told himself. You don’t even like Mindy. Jessica was right: You’re pathetic, a college guy still trolling for high-school birds.
He got drunk with Patrick that night and blew off class the next day. Cheektowaga was perfect because he could go to the mall in sweatpants and no one stared. The pool of mediocrity was warm and inviting; Ben felt he could swim in it for the next ten years, just float on his back, gazing at the sky. Mall Muzak played REO Speedwagon, Aldo Nova, and Elvis’s Vegas years. Fucking brilliant, thought Ben. Fucking perfect. Fucking pathetic.
* * *
They put Ben in the upstairs guest bedroom, on a high bed surrounded by lacy pillows, in a room with soft white walls and a soft white carpet. An armoire stood against the far wall, fake ivy trailing from a blue-and-white ceramic pot sitting atop the cabinet. A white teddy bear wearing a Harley Davidson leather vest lay on its side, entangled in the ivy, peeking out from its plastic jungle.
Downstairs Ben heard the laughter of Darryl and his gang. The old man was talking, joking, telling stories. Ben had left him seated on the couch, gauze taped to his temple, drinking milk from a brandy snifter (“I’ll take a milk and brandy without the brandy”) and eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (“Toast that bread dark as night and go heavy on the peanut butter”).
He stared at the ceiling, smooth white glowing pale from the half-moon. It was during moments like these, Ben thought—unexpected late-night parties, laughter trilling past midnight—that his alienation surfaced at its most savage. Of course, only he remained aware of it, hiding behind a smile and understanding nods.
He didn’t know where the alienation originated because it had always been with him, long before his father’s death. He’d had it as a child, listening to his parents laughing and drinking in the living room with their friends, and he remembered squeezing his eyes shut as hard as he could—blossoms of white, red, and yellow dissolving and reforming in the dark—until the noise faded away, their voices retreating into soft babbles and the clink of glasses. Nothing comforted him during those late nights. Only the autistic closeness of his blanket and the rhythm of his heart in his ears.
The night he found out his father had been rammed into a hot dog stand, he left the house and drove to the driving range. He’d never golfed before, never understood the appeal of walking around a giant lawn all day, lugging a bag full of iron sticks. But that night—the phone call, the amnesiac drive to his parents’ house, the confusion, the salted peanuts for dinner—he wanted to golf, the best part of golf, the only part he understood: smacking the shit out of a little white ball.
He bought ten buckets and asked the skinny kid behind the counter to give him their best driver. The kid—wearing a baseball cap and a T-shirt with
Bobby’s Links
blocked across the front—snickered and said, “They’re all shit,” and gave Ben a chipped club with a dull face. Ben didn’t care, even if he felt like taking a swing at the skinny kid’s face.
He’d left his mom on the couch, with her sister and some cousins from his dad’s side. He didn’t think about them as he whacked ball after ball into the night, tiny white spheres zipping into the fluorescent dark like tracer fire. He didn’t think about his father and the hot dog stand. He didn’t think about his final year of college beginning in one week. He just swung and swung, shocked at how far the balls seemed to travel, imagining himself at long last discovering his true calling, his hidden talent unveiling a path to glory. Maybe I’m a born golfer, Ben remembered thinking that night. The first tour I win, I’ll thank my dad.
The old man shook him awake.
“We’re running late,” he said. “We need to get to Kentucky by dusk.”
Ben sat up. Morning light soaked the carpet. The old man’s bandage was fresh and his hair was still wet from a shower. He wore his black bathrobe.
“There’s some breakfast waiting for you,” the old man said, then he left, whistling.
Ben walked downstairs. Sunlight poured through the kitchen windows. Myra stood behind the breakfast bar, her black hair wet and brushed back behind her ears. She wore a white bathrobe and pink slippers. Her face looked freshly scrubbed. Pieces of mascara clung to her eyelashes.
“Good morning,” she said. “We saved you some bacon and I can put on a fresh pot if you’d like.”
Ben looked around the living room. No trace of the night before. No bloodied gauze, no bikers.
“Where’s Darryl?”
“At work. Coffee?”
“I’m okay.” Ben sat at the bar and munched on a crinkled strip. “Where’s the old man?”
“You mean Elvis.”
Ben smiled but she did not.
“It’s really him,” she said.
He said nothing.
“It’s him,” she insisted. “Last night onstage—don’t tell me you didn’t feel something.” She pulled out the dishwasher rack and began loading glasses into a cupboard. “He told me the two of you are going to rescue his granddaughter.”
“That’s the plan.”
“Can I go with you?”
Ben paused in mid-chew. “It’s not up to me. I mean, it’s his granddaughter—”
“Last month my niece Rhianna died,” Myra said. “When she was five the doctors diagnosed her with lymphoma and said she’d be gone in six months. That was four years ago. We’d just celebrated her ninth birthday. She couldn’t hold on anymore, but she was such a little warrior.” She closed the cupboard and took a deep breath. “One month after her diagnosis, we took Rhianna to Graceland and she touched that painting of the King. The one with Priscilla and Lisa Marie and he’s wearing those tinted glasses—”
“Myra, he’s not Elvis.”
She stared at Ben. “You felt something last night. Tell me you didn’t.”
“I did. But that doesn’t make him Elvis.”
“Four years,” Myra said. “The doctors gave my niece six months, and after she touched that painting she held on for four years. Now, explain that to me.”
“I can’t.” Ben wanted to ask,
If that painting worked like you think it did, how come your niece still died?
But he kept quiet because a few months after his father’s death he was convinced his father had faked it so he could leave town and start a new family. Grief made you believe the sun revolved around the earth and that kid from
Saved by the Bell
died from eating Mentos with Diet Coke and if you feed a seagull Alka-Seltzer its stomach explodes.
The old man walked into the kitchen from the back of the house. He leaned over and kissed Myra on the cheek.
“Now, is that good bacon or is that good bacon,” he said. “Never liked it with the soft fat around the edges.”
Ben’s cell vibrated in his pocket. He looked at the number and excused himself, walking back upstairs.
“Ben?”
Downstairs he heard Myra shriek with laughter. In his mind he saw the old man feeding her a bacon strip. Inch by inch. The crumbly burnt stuff falling into her barely tied robe.
“Ben, I spoke with your father last night.”
He slid down to the white carpet, his back against the side of the bed. He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead.
“I just wanted to tell you I haven’t dreamt about him in weeks, but he apologized and said he’s been very busy. Very busy—can you imagine? Anyway, he wanted me to tell you that you need to be careful because apartment fires are among the top five killers of men in their mid-twenties. He said that no matter how careful you are yourself, you live in a public building and cannot control the actions of others. Chinese cooking uses a lot of oil, you know. And the Chinese are not known for their safety.”
“We have smoke alarms, Mom. In every room.”
“And in the stairwells?”
“Yes.”
“Your father is still very concerned. Fire inspectors are overworked and understaffed. I doubt they’ve come to your building within the past year.”
“We had an inspection a few months ago. I requested one, after you called.”
“And the inspector was thorough?”
“He seemed very competent.”
“That’s fine but it only takes one day to violate code. Maybe you should call for another inspection. Your father and I think it would be prudent.”
“Tell Dad there’s nothing to worry about. Tell him I’m being very careful.”
“You can tell him yourself.”
“I’d rather you tell him.”
Silence. Ben counted the seconds. He could see his mom, sitting at the kitchen table, sleep lines creasing her face.