Stories (2011) (69 page)

“Oh God,” he said softly. “I like that. I like that.”

He closed his eyes and slept. And for the first time in a
long time, not fitfully.

Lunchtime. The Shady Rest lunch room.

Elvis sat with a plate of steamed carrots and broccoli and
flaky roast beef in front of him. A dry roll, a pat of butter and a short glass
of milk soldiered on the side. It was not inspiring.

Next to him, The Blue Yodeler was stuffing a carrot up her
nose while she expounded on the sins of God, The Heavenly Father, for knocking
up that nice Mary in her sleep, slipping up her ungreased poontang while she
snored, and—bless her little heart—not even knowing it, or getting a clit throb
from it, but waking up with a belly full of baby and no memory of action.

Elvis had heard it all before. It used to offend him, this
talk of God as rapist, but he’d heard it so much now he didn’t care. She
rattled on.

Across the way, an old man who wore a black mask and
sometimes a white Stetson, known to residents and staff alike as Kemosabe,
snapped one of his two capless cap pistols at the floor and called for an
invisible Tonto to bend over so he could drive him home.

At the far end of the table, Dillinger was talking about how
much whisky he used to drink, and how many cigars he used to smoke before he
got his dick cut off at the stump and split so he could become a she and hide
out as a woman. Now she said she no longer thought of banks and machine guns,
women and fine cigars. She now thought about spots on dishes, the colors of
curtains and drapes as coordinated with carpets and walls.

Even as the depression of his surroundings settled over him
again, Elvis deliberated last night, and glanced down the length of the table
at Jack (Mr. Kennedy), who headed its far end. He saw the old man was looking
at him, as if they shared a secret.

Elvis’s ill mood dropped a notch; a real mystery was at work
here, and come nightfall, he was going to investigate.

Swing the Shady Rest Convalescent Home’s side of the Earth
away from the sun again, and swing the moon in close and blue again. Blow some
gauzy clouds across the nasty, black sky. Now ease on into 3 A.M.

Elvis awoke with a start and turned his head toward the
intrusion. Jack stood next to the bed looking down at him. Jack was wearing a
suit coat over his nightgown and he had on thick glasses. He said, “Sebastian.
It’s loose.”

Elvis collected his thoughts, pasted them together into a
not-tooscattered collage. “What’s loose?”

“It,” said Sebastian. “Listen.”

Elvis listened. Out in the hall he heard the scuttling sound
of the night before. Tonight, it reminded him of great locust-wings beating
frantically inside a small cardboard box, the tips of them scratching at the
cardboard, cutting it, ripping it apart.

“Jesus Christ, what is it?” Elvis said.

“I thought it was Lyndon Johnson, but it isn’t. I’ve come
across new evidence that suggests another assassin.”

“Assassin?”

Jack cocked an ear. The sound had gone away, moved distant,
then ceased.

“It’s got another target tonight,” said Jack. “Come on. I
want to show you something. I don’t think it’s safe if you go back to sleep.”

“For Christ sake,” Elvis said. “Tell the administrators.”

“The suits and the white starches,” Jack said. “No thanks. I
trusted them back when I was in Dallas, and look where that got my brain and
me. I’m thinking with sand here, maybe picking up a few waves from my brain.
Someday, who’s to say they won’t just disconnect the battery at the White
House?”

“That’s something to worry about, all right,” Elvis said.

“Listen here,” Jack said. “I know you’re Elvis, and there
were rumors, you know . . . about how you hated me, but I’ve thought it over.
You hated me, you could have finished me the other night. All I want from you
is to look me in the eye and assure me you had nothing to do with that day in
Dallas, and that you never knew Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby.”

Elvis stared at him as sincerely as possible. “I had nothing
to do with Dallas, and I knew neither Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby.”

“Good,” said Jack. “May I call you Elvis instead of
Sebastian?”

“You may.”

“Excellent. You wear glasses to read?”

“I wear glasses when I really want to see,” Elvis said.

Get ’em and come on.”

Elvis swung his walker along easily, not feeling as if he
needed it too much tonight. He was excited. Jack was a nut, and maybe he
himself was nuts, but there was an adventure going on.

They came to the hall restroom. The one reserved for male
visitors. “In here,” Jack said.

“Now wait a minute,” Elvis said. “You’re not going to get me
in there and try and play with my pecker, are you?”

Jack stared at him. “Man, I made love to Jackie and Marilyn
and a ton of others, and you think I want to play with your nasty ole dick?”

“Good point,” said Elvis.

They went into the restroom. It was large, with several
stalls and urinals.

“Over here,” said Jack. He went over to one of the stalls
and pushed open the door and stood back by the commode to make room for Elvis’s
walker. Elvis eased inside and looked at what Jack was now pointing to.

Graffiti.

“That’s it?” Elvis said. “We’re investigating a scuttling in
the hall, trying to discover who attacked you last night, and you bring me in
here to show me stick pictures on the shit house wall?”

“Look close,” Jack said.

Elvis leaned forward. His eyes weren’t what they used to be,
and his glasses probably needed to be upgraded, but he could see that instead:

Book of the Dead
and
The Complete Works of H. P.
Lovecraft
.

Straight away he recognized what he was staring at.
“Egyptian hieroglyphics,” he said.

“Right-a-reen-O,” Jack said. “Hey, you’re not as stupid as
some folks made you out.”

“Thanks,” Elvis said.

Jack reached into his suit coat pocket and took out a folded
piece of paper and unfolded it. He pressed it to the wall. Elvis saw that it
was covered with the same sort of figures that were on the wall of the stall.

“I copied this down yesterday. I came in here to shit
because they hadn’t cleaned up my bathroom. I saw this on the wall, went back
to my room and looked it up in my books and wrote it all down. The top line
translates something like:
Pharaoh gobbles donkey goober.
And the bottom
line is:
Cleopatra does the dirty.
”

“What?”

“Well, pretty much,” Jack said.

Elvis was mystified. “All right,” he said. “One of the nuts
here, present company excluded, thinks he’s Tutankhamun or something, and he
writes on the wall in hieroglyphics. So what? I mean, what’s the connection?
Why are we hanging out in a toilet?”

“I don’t know how they connect exactly,” Jack said. “Not
yet. But this . . . thing, it caught me asleep last night, and I came awake
just in time to . . . well, he had me on the floor and had his mouth over my
asshole.”

“A shit eater?” Elvis said.

“I don’t think so,” Jack said. “He was after my soul. You
can get that out of any of the major orifices in a person’s body. I’ve read
about it.”

“Where?” Elvis asked. “
Hustler
?”

“
The Everyday Man or Woman’s Book of the Soul,
by
David Webb. It has some pretty good movie reviews about stolen soul movies in
the back too.”

“Oh, that sounds trustworthy,” Elvis said.

They went back to Jack’s room and sat on his bed and looked
through his many books on astrology, the Kennedy assassination, and a number of
esoteric tomes, including the philosophy book,
The Everyday Man or Woman’s
Book of the Soul.

Elvis found that book fascinating in particular; it
indicated that not only did humans have a soul, but that the soul could be
stolen, and there was a section concerning vampires and ghouls and incubi and
succubi, as well as related soul suckers. Bottom line was, one of those dudes
was around, you had to watch your holes. Mouth hole. Nose hole. Asshole. If you
were a woman, you needed to watch a different hole. Dick pee-holes and ear
holes—male or female—didn’t matter. The soul didn’t hang out there. They weren’t
considered major orifices for some reason.

In the back of the book was a list of items, related and not
related to the book, that you could buy. Little plastic pyramids. Hats you
could wear while channeling. Subliminal tapes that would help you learn Arabic.
Postage was paid.

“Every kind of soul eater is in that book except politicians
and science-fiction fans,” Jack said. “And I think that’s what we got here in
Shady Rest. A soul eater. Turn to the Egyptian section.”

Elvis did. The chapter was prefaced by a movie still from
The
Ten Commandments
with Yul Brynner playing Pharaoh. He was standing up in
his chariot looking serious, which seemed a fair enough expression, considering
the Red Sea, which had been parted by Moses, was about to come back together
and drown him and his army.

Elvis read the article slowly while Jack heated hot water
with his plug-in heater and made cups of instant coffee. “I get my niece to
smuggle this stuff in,” said Jack. “Or she claims to be my niece. She’s a black
woman. I never saw her before I was shot that day in Dallas and they took my
brain out. She’s part of the new identity they’ve given me. She’s got a great
ass.”

“Damn,” said Elvis. “What it says here, is that you can bury
some dude, and if he gets the right tanna leaves and spells said over him and
such bullshit, he can come back to life some thousands of years later, and to
stay alive, he has to suck on the souls of the living, and that if the souls
are small, his life force doesn’t last long. Small. What’s that mean?”

“Read on . . . No, never mind, I’ll tell you.” Jack handed
Elvis his cup of coffee and sat down on the bed next to him. “Before I do, want
a Ding Dong? Not mine. The chocolate kind. Well, I guess mine is chocolate, now
that I’ve been dyed.”

“You got Ding Dongs?” Elvis asked.

“Couple of Pay Days and Baby Ruth too,” Jack said. “Which
will it be? Let’s get decadent.”

Elvis licked his lips. “I’ll have a Ding Dong.”

While Elvis savored the Ding Dong, gumming it sloppily,
sipping his coffee between bites, Jack, coffee cup balanced on his knee, a Baby
Ruth in one mitt, expounded.

“Small souls means those without much fire for life,” Jack
said. “You know a place like that?”

“If souls were fires,” Elvis said, “they couldn’t burn much
lower without being out than here. Only thing we got going in this joint is the
pilot light.”

“Exactamundo,” Jack said. “What we got here in Shady Rest is
an Egyptian soul sucker of some sort. A mummy hiding out, coming in here to
feed on the sleeping. It’s perfect, you see. The souls are little, and don’t
provide him with much. If this thing comes back two or three times in a row to
wrap his lips around some elder’s asshole, that elder is going to die pretty
soon, and who’s the wiser? Our mummy may not be getting much energy out of
this, way he would with big souls, but the prey is easy. A mummy couldn’t be
too strong, really. Mostly just husk. But we’re pretty much that way ourselves.
We’re not too far off being mummies.”

“And with new people coming in all the time,” Elvis said,
“he can keep this up forever, this soul robbing.”

“That’s right. Because that’s what we’re brought here for.
To get us out of the way until we die. And the ones don’t die first of disease,
or just plain old age, he gets.”

Elvis considered all that. “That’s why he doesn’t bother the
nurses and aides and administrators? He can go unsuspected.”

“That, and they’re not asleep. He has to get you when you’re
sleeping or unconscious.”

“All right, but the thing throws me, Jack, is how does an
ancient Egyptian end up in an East Texas rest home, and why is he writing on
shit house walls?”

“He went to take a crap, got bored, and wrote on the wall.
He probably wrote on pyramid walls, centuries ago.”

“What would he crap?” Elvis said. “It’s not like he’d eat,
is it?”

“He eats souls,” Jack said, “so I assume, he craps soul
residue. And what that means to me is, you die by his mouth, you don’t go to
the other side, or wherever souls go. He digests the souls till they don’t
exist anymore—”

“And you’re just so much toilet water decoration,” Elvis
said.

“That’s the way I’ve got it worked out,” Jack said. “He’s
just like anyone else when he wants to take a dump. He likes a nice clean place
with a flush. They didn’t have that in his time, and I’m sure he finds it handy.
The writing on the walls is just habit. Maybe, to him, Pharaoh and Cleopatra
were just yesterday.”

Elvis finished off the Ding Dong and sipped his coffee. He
felt a rush from the sugar and he loved it. He wanted to ask Jack for the Pay
Day he had mentioned, but restrained himself. Sweets, fried foods, late nights
and drugs had been the beginning of his original downhill spiral. He had to
keep himself collected this time. He had to be ready to battle the Egyptian
soul-sucking menace.