“Uh, yeah. Sounds right.”
“Why did you carry that flashlight, Elvis?”
“Well, I got eye problems. One-eye problem, I guess. Had to wear dark glasses. And I liked to know what was going on. Out there, in the dark.”
“You were being vigilant.”
“Yeah. That’s it.”
“You were something of a lawman, in a way, weren’t you?”
“Hey, you musta been a fan, Mr. Midnight, is that right?”
“I guess everybody was your fan.”
“Not ever’body. I had my naysayers. You can’t do anything unusual in the world without naysayers. But I could handle that. Hell, I had ‘em in high school; didn’t like me wearin’ my hair long or dressing like I did, wanted to beat me up. They weren’t gonna beat me up when I had law enforcement badges from almost every place in the country. Even one I got from drug enforcement, through President Nixon. He was very happy to meet me. I was a Jaycees Outstanding Young Man of the Year in seventy … one. Two? Somewhere in there. Didya know that?”
“I knew that, Elvis,” Matt said soothingly.
The caller seemed not to have heard him. “Naysayers.
Naysayers who sit in your own living room and then go out and take money from some New York publisher to make you look like a fool … make you look bad to your little girl … those kind are hard to take.”
Matt was silent for a moment too long. Dead air time was the bane of talk shows. But the man had sounded genuinely upset just then. Poor soul, did he really believe his own impersonation?
“That was rough,” Matt said. “When those guys got fired and wrote that tell-all book about you. You got . pretty sick after that.”
Pretty sick? He had died only a couple of weeks after the release of the scandalous Elvis, What Happened? book in 1977.
“Daddy done fired ‘em. First definite thing my Daddy ever did in his life, and it ended up gettin’ that awful book written. I talked to Red. He called, and I kinda asked him to stop it, but he said he couldn’t. He even tape-recorded me without my knowin’ and put that in his damn book! I couldn’t believe one of my guys would do that to me. Red was with me from high school. Why’d he do that, Mr. Midnight? Why?”
Matt glanced at the clock, pointed a forefinger at his wrist so that Leticia couldn’t miss it. She didn’t. Past one A.M. They were in overtime. But she just kept rolling her fingers in the gesture that meant keep going. Apparently, to continue the football metaphor, they were in sudden death overtime. Matt mentally scanned his skimmed reading material for the relevant response.
“Well, Elvis, he was mad, and Red always had a hellacious temper. He couldn’t believe he’d be fired after all those years with you, and his cousin Sonny had been fired too.”
“But to say those things in public, those private things—”
“You were rough on the people around you. Demanded all their time anytime you needed them.” “I had to! Good God, man, you don’t know what aperforming schedule I was on, from the earliest days when me and my two band guys was driving ourselves around, doin’ up to three shows a day. Then later, it was the movies, and those are long, long hours. Then later the tours. Colonel kept me hoppin’ with those two back-to-back Vegas shows a night, and road tours night after night, week after week. It’s a wonder I made it as long as I did.”
“As long as—how long, Elvis, until—?” Matt thought he had him.
The King sounded confused for the first time. His words slurred slightly. “Until I-I I just wore out, and, and I I… I took some time off.”
“Nothing happened, did it? Nothing bad?”
“Well … I got kinda sick there. Real sick. Collapsed, you might say. It’s pretty … fuzzy. I was takin’ these sleepin’ pills, see, could never sleep. Had too much energy when I was a kid and it carried over. And I’d sleepwalk, you know. People had to be there to watch me. That’s why I needed ‘em there for me, once Mama was gone. I’d just stroll out the door of the house and walk on down the road and Mama and Daddy would get all upset. That’s why I had to sleep with Mama all those years, so I wouldn’t wander outa the house, get run over or something.”
Matt hesitated. Here was an opening, should he take it? What was he, a counselor or a coward?
“You had a special relationship with your mother, didn’t you, Elvis?”
“Yes, sir, I did. I didn’t know it at the time, I guess. It just seemed natural. But we were real close. Never had no one close as her again. She was my best girl. Not that she was perfect. Kinda tried to hold me back when I got out on the road and ran into all those pretty girls. But mamas are like that. They want you be upright and clean, and, man, that’s hard with all those pretty little things screamin’ and carrying on. She liked some of my early girlfriends, though. June. And Anita. Just warned me about the blue-eyed ones. She had real dark eyes, my mama. Dark eyes. Dark hair.”
A pause lasted so long Matt thought they had lost him. He made a shrugging gesture at Leticia, who shook her head in mystification.
“ ‘Course my mama’s hair was dark later on because I got her to dye it black like mine. I figured we should match, you know. Like me and Cilia. My mama’s eyes got real dark towards the end there. She had these black circles around her eyes. Like bull’s-eyes. Poor little Mama, it like to have killed her when I was drafted and sent off to Germany. I think she died before I went so’s she wouldn’t have to see it.”
“But she would have gone with you. Your father did, and your grandmother, and Red.”
“Yeah, but … she hadn’t been well, my little Satnin’. To tell you the truth, though she wanted my success more than anybody and was tellin’ me I could do anything, she hadn’t figured on me bein’ gone so much. I’d never slept away from home until I had to go on the road with Scotty and Bill. And then I could afford to get a car or two, even my first Cadillac .. .man, was that a charge! And then I could take out girls, and Mama, she’d never figured on all that screaming stuff and girls tearin’ off my clothes and rioting and comin’ to my motel room doors. So she kinda felt she lost me, I guess. And I guess I was like any young guy, everythin’ was tumbling my way like apples off a tree, and I was gonna pick up a few and bite ‘em, you know what I mean? Mamas don’t like to think of things like that. They’re on a higher plane.”
“You mean in heaven?”
“Oh, yeah, my mama’s in heaven. If I hadn’ta believed that, I could never have gone on without her as long as I did.”
“And how long was that?”
“Well, my whole life.”
“And how old are you now?”
“Uh, oh, I don’t like to think about them things. When you’re a performer, you’re supposed to stay the same as you always were forever. Forever Young. It’s the name of a song. Just not my song, I guess. Never recorded it. Never sang it in concert. By that Dylan guy. Did a few of his. Pretty good songwriter. Couldn’t sing worth a rat’s ass, though. Nobody can nowadays. Elvis, What Happened? shit! What happened to the music world, huh? I had almost a three-octave range, and I used it. I did all those ballads. I sang good, like Lanza. And all of us guys who could sing, we’re history. These so-called singers today, they rasp, they screech, they shout, but they don’t sing, man. That’s the book they should have written: Elvis, What Happened to Good Singers? Makes you want to … well, that’s the problem these days. Isn’t anything much I want to do. I was getting that way before I, um, retired.”
“And what made you come out of retirement?” “Huh? What’s that you said? Mr., uh, Midnight, isn’t it?”
“That’s right. Mr. Midnight. And I asked why you came out of retirement.”
The laughter came then, long and trailing off into weary, high-pitched sounds, like he’d laughed until he’d cried.