“This is enough to make me quit smoking,” Ginnie said, snubbing out another cigarette.
I took out my cell and found the photo I had taken on it.
“Oh shit,” she muttered after staring at it for a full minute, “it looks like it might be one of the … Asshole Brothers.”
“Who?”
“That’s what Elvis used to call them. The East brothers who wrote that damn book.”
“Oh, you mean …?”
Elvis, Why
? It brought Elvis so much pain and grief.” “
I could see his pain reflected on her face from all those years ago.
“That black fella, what’s his name?”
“Gustavo Benoit.”
“Well, he did me a big favor that day which he didn’t even know about.”
“What was that?”
“In that purse was a bracelet Elvis gave me for my birthday. It’s really the last thing I have of his other than a lot of bittersweet memories. It actually meant a lot to me.”
When a prospective customer walked into her shop, Ginnie went to assist the woman. Checking my watch, I realized that if I drove like hell I could save the cost of another night at Jazzing Around and get back up to Vinetta’s in Daumland just before she put the older kids to bed. As I took Interstate 55 out of the city, it occurred to me that Elvis’s last girlfriend had revealed a new possible motive for murder—even while opening up a new mystery. Pappy East had betrayed the King, but so had his brother Rod—now named John Carpenter. Why would one brother kill another? Ten thousand was a lot, but was it enough to prompt a murder?
The further north I drove the more questions I had. Why would John Carpenter open an Elvis cover bar? It didn’t make sense. On the long drive back up to Tennessee, I only stopped once, at a convenience store. I got a large cup of coffee and a bag of bananas.
T
hough I made record time, it was dark when I finally parked and walked up the unweeded path toward Vinet-ta’s trailer singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”
As I opened the door, Floyd Jr. started applauding me. Vinetta and the other kids joined in.
“My God, your singing’s really gotten good,” Vinetta said. She was trimming the hair of one of the restless girls. “You really do sound lonesome tonight.”
“Well, I don’t know if I’ll win any contests, but I’m going to give it the old college try.”
“On top of the costume and performance, you got to get his look down.”
“I plan to.”
“Then you better step on it,” said Floyd Jr., “cause you only got a week.”
“I know.”
“Floyd Jr. had me buy you some glue-on sideburns,” Vin said, and surprised me by holding them up for me—two thick strips of fur.
“Thank you. Oh, I got some sweet bananas.” None of them were interested.
“Why don’t you put your fanny in this chair and let me Elvisize you,” Vin said to gloss over the fruit rejection.
“You think you can do it?”
“I always got compliments with Floyd’s pompadour.”
When the little blond girl hopped off the stool, I removed several thick elevating books from it and sat down. Vinetta wrapped a checkered tablecloth around my neck, and to a cassette of Elvis’s “Don’t Be Cruel,” she wet my hair back and began snipping away.
There was no mirror, so it was a leap of faith as clumps of my hair feathered down onto the floor.
“Did you know I am a quarter Apache?” Vinetta said. “My grandfather on my mother’s side.”
“Really?”
“Yep, and I’ve just been dying to scalp your wonderful head of black hair.”
For half an hour, as her kids yelped for dinner and got into scuffles, Vinetta kept cutting, sometimes pausing and comparing my head with photos of Elvis. When she was done, she yanked the red checkered cloth away and said, “There you are—Elvis on a great hair day.”
“Really?” I nervously glimpsed at myself in the reflection of a shiny pot.
“Well, you still need about a gallon of bear grease to lube it back, but you are Elvis from the forehead up.”
In the bathroom mirror, I saw that she had actually done it. I donned Elvis’s combed-back dorsal fin.
Unsurprisingly, the more I looked the part, the more energized I felt. I launched myself further into Elvis mania. Online, I saw that there was an industry of books about him. There were books on his flamboyant clothes, on his retro cars, on his fat-filled recipes. There were tomes on how to impersonate him, how to walk, talk, and sing like him. There were stories about the day he died, and volumes on his relationship with everyone who ever brushed up against him. Eventually I even found a book about the books of Elvis.
At Floyd Jr.’s suggestion, I watched one of the King’s movies,
Kid Creole
, on their home VCR. Carefully I tried mimicking his gestures and voice.
“Elvis had about half a dozen signature expressions,” Vin said, having sized him up and whittled him down with Floyd. “One of his sexiest was when he was trying to hold back a smile.”
Soon she suggested just staring at myself in a pocket mirror practicing facial expressions. Gradually I surprised even myself as I belted out his songs, hit the various notes, and slowly it all started coming together. I tried to pair up different parts of three songs with his key expressions.
Three days before the contest, after nonstop practice, I woke up not feeling my usual self. My breasts were strangely tender and my stomach had cramped up. I had this dreaded fear of cancer, so I was grateful when the feeling passed. As I left the bathroom Vinetta was up in her nightgown preparing bagged lunches and breakfast for her food-slinging crew.
As she woke, washed, dressed, and fed the older members of her brood, I tried to help. Tossing a laundry load in the machine before marching them off to the bus stop, she returned to break up a fight and clean the play area. Then she washed the breakfast dishes. Her thankless day went on like that incessantly.
“Christ!” she exclaimed, sitting down winded for the first time around one. “How’m I gonna make it to the store before three?”
Grateful for a reason to get out of the trailer park, I drove down Makataka Road out to the Murphy County Mall. There I started filling up a cart with everything on her list, replacing some of her items with nutritionally superior products that cost a bit more, picking up exotic food like tofu and cinnamon rice cakes to broaden their culinary vocabulary. I also bought two extra-large containers of suntan lotion. En route I rang my neighbor, Miss Basall, to see whether our landlord had corrected the structural damage that had left us both temporarily homeless.
“Nope,” she said dopily, “but I got an adorable sublet in Williamsburg.”
While returning to the homestead, I noticed recurrent posters on utility poles announcing,
COUNTY FAIR
. I stopped and read that it was going to be held that weekend on “the old Daumland airstrip.” Back at Vinetta’s, I showed her some of the things I’d picked up. She looked confused at the tofu.
“D’ya stew that in the suntan lotion?” she kidded.
I offered to cook the tofu and informed her of the dangers of the sun on children and the risk of skin cancer later in life; I also pointed out that rice cakes were better than all the sugary crap she bought and mentioned the dramatic rise of childhood diabetes. While helping her put some of the items away, I noticed that she had food with partially hydrogenated oils, and warned her about the dangers of trans fats on her kids’ systems.
Fearing that I was beginning to sound like some sanctimonious know-it-all—like my mother—I quickly changed the subject and mentioned that the fair was going to open the next day.
“That’s great. It rarely comes to this part of the county, but we still can’t go.”
“Why the heck not?”
“The secret to raising seven kids,” she explained, “is you don’t take them off the farm. At least until puberty. That’s when they escape on their own.”
“Come on, Ma!” the eight-year-old yelled.
“Yeah, we never get out,” the seven-year-old added.
“We want to go to the fair!” others chimed in.
“Oh, look what you’ve started,” Vinetta said to me. “Keeping an eye on seven kids is just way too hard.”
“We can do it together. That’s only three and a half kids apiece.”
“Another thing is it costs too much. I’m on a tight budget.”
“It’ll be my treat.”
“Please, Ma! Please, Mama! Please!” chirped the many little mouths.
“We just can’t!” she hollered back. “Now I don’t want to hear nothing more about it.”
There was a somber mood in the house the rest of the day. I let her have her space while she prepared dinner. Glancing over at some point, I noticed she was slicing up and steaming the tofu.
“I thought you never cooked tofu before.”
“That’s cause you think I’m some country bumpkin, so I end up playing the role.”
“If that’s true, I’m sorry.”
“If I told you the real reason we can’t go to the fair, you’d think, yep, she’s just a dumb hick.”
“I swear I will not be judgmental.”
“All right. After Floyd died, I realized I was in deep over my head. No money, seven kids, I was in a real bad place. So I made a deal with …” she lowered her voice, “with my Lord. It was very simple: I would devote myself to just staying here and living the simple life and in return he’d keep an eye on us.”
“Look, your relationship with your god is entirely your business, and no person should interfere with that. But this is just the county fair across town. And it’s not even about entertainment as much as education. Someday soon your children are going to be leaving Daumland and they’re going to have to draw on what little they know of the world beyond this trailer park.”
She didn’t respond. Without intending to, I was indeed getting into her business. I returned to my Elvis recitals. Maybe it was how quiet everyone was, but about midway through dinner Vinetta suddenly anounced, “We’re going to the country fair tomorrow!”
“Ye-e-e-eeh!!!” the kids screamed. Ecstatically, Floyd Jr. and Urleen started marching around the room like they had just won a battle. It was such a strange experience being with them because it had been so long since I felt excited, or had even looked forward to anything. Now it was impossible not to get swept up in that maelstrom of infantile joy. It also saddened me to remember all the innocence I had lost so long ago.
That Saturday, after the sloppy feeding ritual and the excruciating process of washing and dressing all seven kids, Vinetta gathered everyone outside and she read them the riot act: “Y’all have to hold hands in public. And if any one of ya wander off, look for an official and tell him my name, so they can say it over the P.A. Also, if anyone of y’all get out of hand or has a tantrum—that’s it! I’ll have you all back in the truck and we’ll be back home in a wink.”
After an unsynchronized chorus of agreement, they loaded into the back of the pickup. Vinetta kept her eyes on the highway while I craned my neck around to watch the kids. We bounced along the mile or so of Makataka Road until we came to the interstate.
Half an hour later we pulled into a large gravel-strewn parking lot half-filled with old and dented cars, some of which had decals of the Confederate flag or bumper stickers with slogans against gun control, gay marriage, and abortion. We unloaded the seven kids and carefully corralled them to the entrance.
There everyone paid a one-dollar admission fee and we walked down the busy lanes of hastily erected booths and strange vehicles that had been transformed into small carnival rides.
I converted a twenty-dollar bill into two rolls of quarters. One by one, we let each of the kids take a turn at various events: bumper car rides for the three boys, who couldn’t resist smashing into other children; cup and saucer rides for the two older girls, who screamed and cried the entire time, then immediately asked to go again. I felt vertigo just watching it all.
At the very end of the walkway, a group of massive tents had been pitched. A series of contests and exhibitions were scheduled there throughout the day. The world’s largest squash and pumpkin were allegedly on display with big blue ribbons. There were pie making, pie eating, and pie throwing contests. We watched light rodeo competitions. Children were lassoing and bronco-busting sheep and goats. Charity auctions were being held throughout the afternoon for homemade or homegrown items. And there were endless rides: hay wagon rides, camel rides, balloon rides, and looming behind it all was a huge Ferris wheel.
All wanted to go up on the big red wheel. When we got in line, Vinetta bumped into her cousin Edwina. They had been best friends growing up. The two immediately regressed into a pair of schoolgirls, chatting and giggling nonstop. I bought them all tickets, and cherished my five childfree minutes alone on the ground.
Able to calmly take in some of my surroundings for the first time that day, I spotted old Snake Major. Near him were the others from the B.S. It turned out they were peddling beer from a booth that was advertising the upcoming Elvis contest. To win a free Elvis lamp or T-shirt—or whatever merchandise they could press Elvis’s face onto—a string of contenders turned up their collars, slipped on a plastic Elvis pompadour, and, with the help of a karaoke prompter, belted out an Elvis hit.
For an instant, I had this urge to go right up to Snake and just lay it on the line: the dead burglar’s hand for fifty grand. But then I remembered that Floyd may have given in to that same impulse, and if so, it had cost him his life.
I watched to see if I could learn anything from these spontaneous improvisers. One woman attempted to sing “Blue Suede Shoes,” but she didn’t have her glasses and couldn’t read the teleprompter, so she just made up her own lyrics:
“You can steal my iPod, wreck my car, hit me over the head with a mason jar … Just don’t step on my blue suede shoes …”
“Too bad Elvis didn’t have a teleprompter, he was always blowing his lines,” I heard behind me. To my surprise, standing there was the last man I had been intimate with—Jeeves, the human train wreck. He looked even older and more grizzled in the naked light of day, but I liked him all the more for it.
“I’m truly sorry about the situation the last time we met,” I said, referring to Gustavo’s tragic death.