Stories (2011) (72 page)

Elvis let his hand play over the wheelchair switches, as
nimbly as he had once played with studio keyboards. He roared the wheelchair up
the incline toward Bubba Ho-Tep, terrified but determined, and as he rolled, in
a voice cracking, but certainly reminiscent of him at his best, he began to
sing “Don’t Be Cruel,” and within instants, he was on Bubba Ho-Tep and his busy
shadows.

Bubba Ho-Tep looked up as Elvis roared into range, singing.
Bubba Ho-Tep’s open mouth irised to normal size, and teeth, formerly
nonexistent, rose up in his gums like little black stumps. Electric locusts
crackled and hopped in his empty sockets. He yelled something in Egyptian.
Elvis saw the words jump out of Bubba Ho-Tep’s mouth in visible hieroglyphics
like dark beetles and sticks:

“By the unwinking eye of Ra!”

Elvis bore down on Bubba Ho-Tep. When he was in range, he
ceased singing, and gave the paint sprayer trigger a squeeze. Rubbing alcohol
squirted from the sprayer and struck Bubba Ho-Tep in the face.

Elvis swerved, screeched around Bubba Ho-Tep in a sweeping
circle, came back, the lighter in his hand. As he neared Bubba, the shadows
swarming around the mummy’s head separated and flew high up above him like
startled bats.

The black hat Bubba wore wobbled and sprouted wings and
flapped away from his head, becoming what it had always been, a living shadow.
The shadows came down in a rush, screeching like harpies. They swarmed over
Elvis’s face, giving him the sensation of skinned animal pelts—blood-side
in—being dragged over his flesh.

Bubba bent forward at the waist like a collapsed puppet,
bopped his head against the cement drive. His black bat hat came down out of
the dark in a swoop, expanding rapidly and falling over Bubba’s body,
splattering it like spilled ink. Bubba blob-flowed rapidly under the wheels of
Elvis’s mount and rose up in a dark swell beneath the chair and through the
spokes of the wheels and billowed over the front of the chair and loomed
upwards, jabbing his ravaged, ever-changing face through the flittering
shadows, poking it right at Elvis.

Elvis, through gaps in the shadows, saw a face like an old
jack-o’lantern gone black and to rot, with jagged eyes, nose and mouth. And
that mouth spread tunnel wide, and down that tunnel-mouth Elvis could see the
dark and awful forever that was Bubba’s lot, and Elvis clicked the lighter to
flame, and the flame jumped, and the alcohol lit Bubba’s face, and Bubba’s head
turned baby-eye blue, flowed jet-quick away, splashed upward like a black wave
carrying a blazing oil slick. Then Bubba came down in a shuffle of blazing
sticks and dark mud, a tar baby on fire, fleeing across the concrete drive
toward the creek. The guardian shadows flapped after it, fearful of being
abandoned.

Elvis wheeled over to Jack, leaned forward and whispered:
“Mr. Kennedy.”

Jack’s eyelids fluttered. He could barely move his head, and
something grated in his neck when he did. “The President is soon dead,” he
said, and his clenched fist throbbed and opened, and out fell a wad of paper.
“You got to get him.”

Jack’s body went loose and his head rolled back on his
damaged neck and the moon showed double in his eyes. Elvis swallowed and
saluted Jack. “Mr. President,” he said.

Well, at least he had kept Bubba Ho-Tep from taking Jack’s
soul. Elvis leaned forward, picked up the paper Jack had dropped. He read it
aloud to himself in the moonlight: “You nasty thing from beyond the dead. No
matter what you think and do, good things will never come to you. If evil is
your black design, you can bet the goodness of the Light Ones will kick your
bad behind.”

That’s it?
thought Elvis.
That’s the chant against
evil from the
Book of Souls?
Yeah, right, boss. And what kind of decoder
ring does that come with? Shit, it doesn’t even rhyme well.

Elvis looked up. Bubba Ho-Tep had fallen down in a blue
blaze, but he was rising up again, preparing to go over the lip of the creek,
down to wherever his sanctuary was.

Elvis pulled around Jack and gave the wheelchair full
throttle. He gave out with a rebel cry. His white scarf fluttered in the wind
as he thundered forward.

Bubba Ho-Tep’s flames had gone out. He was on his feet. His
head was hissing gray smoke into the crisp night air. He turned completely to
face Elvis, stood defiant, raised an arm and shook a fist. He yelled, and once
again Elvis saw the hieroglyphics leap out of his mouth. The characters danced
in a row, briefly—and vanished.

Elvis let go of the protective paper. It was dog shit. What
was needed here was action.

“Eat the dog dick of Anubis, you ass-wipe!”

When Bubba Ho-Tep saw Elvis was coming, chair geared to
high, holding the paint sprayer in one hand, he turned to bolt, but Elvis was
on him.

Elvis stuck out a foot and hit Bubba Ho-Tep in the back, and
his foot went right through Bubba. The mummy squirmed, spitted on Elvis’s leg.
Elvis fired the paint sprayer, as Bubba Ho-Tep, himself, and chair went over
the creek bank in a flash of moonlight and a tumble of shadows.

Elvis screamed as the hard ground and sharp stones snapped
his body like a piñata. He made the trip with Bubba Ho-Tep still on his leg,
and when he quit sliding, he ended up close to the creek.

Bubba Ho-Tep, as if made of rubber, twisted around on
Elvis’s leg, and looked at him.

Elvis still had the paint sprayer. He had clung to it as if
it were a life preserver. He gave Bubba another dose. Bubba’s right arm flopped
way out and ran along the ground and found a hunk of wood that had washed up on
the edge of the creek, gripped it, and swung the long arm back. The arm came
around and hit Elvis on the side of the head with the wood.

Elvis fell backwards. The paint sprayer flew from his hands.
Bubba Ho-Tep was leaning over him. He hit Elvis again with the wood. Elvis felt
himself going out. He knew if he did, not only was he a dead sonofabitch, but
so was his soul. He would be just so much crap; no afterlife for him; no
reincarnation; no angels with harps. Whatever lay beyond would not be known to
him. It would all end right here for Elvis Presley. Nothing left but a quick
flush.

Bubba Ho-Tep’s mouth loomed over Elvis’s face. It looked
like an open manhole. Sewage fumes came out of it.

Elvis reached inside his open jumpsuit and got hold of the
folder of matches. Laying back, pretending to nod out so as to bring Bubba
Ho-Tep’s ripe mouth closer, he thumbed back the flap on the matches, thumbed
down one of the paper sticks, and pushed the sulfurous head of the match across
the black strip.

Just as Elvis felt the cloying mouth of Bubba Ho-Tep falling
down on his kisser like a Venus Flytrap, the entire folder of matches ignited
in Elvis’s hand, burned him and made him yell.

The alcohol on Bubba’s body called the flames to it, and
Bubba burst into a stalk of blue flame, singeing the hair off Elvis’s head,
scorching his eyebrows down to nubs, blinding him until he could see nothing
more than a scalding white light.

Elvis realized that Bubba Ho-Tep was no longer on or over
him, and the white light became a stained white light, then a gray light, and
eventually, the world, like a Polaroid negative developing, came into view, greenish
at first, then full of the night’s colors.

Elvis rolled on his side and saw the moon floating in the
water. He saw too a scarecrow floating in the water, the straw separating from
it, the current carrying it away.

No, not a scarecrow. Bubba Ho-Tep. For all his dark magic
and ability to shift, or to appear to shift, fire had done him in, or had it
been the stupid words from Jack’s book on souls? Or both?

It didn’t matter. Elvis got up on one elbow and looked at
the corpse. The water was dissolving it more rapidly and the current was
carrying it away.

Elvis fell over on his back. He felt something inside him
grate against something soft. He felt like a water balloon with a hole poked in
it.

He was going down for the last count, and he knew it.

But I’ve still got my soul, he thought. Still mine. All
mine. And the folks in Shady Rest, Dillinger, The Blue Yodeler, all of them,
they have theirs, and they’ll keep ’em.

Elvis stared up at the stars between the forked and twisted
boughs of an oak. He could see a lot of those beautiful stars, and he realized
now that the constellations looked a little like the outlines of great
hieroglyphics. He turned away from where he was looking, and to his right,
seeming to sit on the edge of the bank, were more stars, more hieroglyphics.

He rolled his head back to the figures above him, rolled to
the right and looked at those. Put them together in his mind.

ALL IS WELL.

He smiled. Suddenly, he thought he could read hieroglyphics
after all, and what they spelled out against the dark beautiful night was
simple, and yet profound.

Elvis closed his eyes and did not open them again.

THE END

Got up this morning and couldn't take it anymore. I'd had
all the cutesy words and hugs I could take from the old bag, and I'd also had
it with my food. She thought that just because I liked something once, I
couldn't wait to have it every day.

Of course, it beat hell out of that McWhipple burger I got
out of the next-door neighbor's trashcan. I saw him toss it out, and as I
recall, he was looking mighty green and holding his stomach. Didn't bother me
none, though; I'd eaten out of his trashcan before. (He even took a shot at me
one night on account of it.) But this McWhipple burger would have made a
vulture choke! Must've been kangaroo meat or something. Or maybe the burger had
just been lying on the assembly line too long. In any case, it sure made me
sick, and up until then I could eat anything short of strychnine.