“Sebastian,” he said. “Sebastian Haff.”
Elvis took hold of Jack’s shoulder and rolled him over. It was about as difficult as rolling a jelly roll. Jack lay on his back now. He strayed an eyeball at Elvis. He started to speak, hesitated. Elvis took hold of Jack’s nightgown and managed to work it down around Jack’s knees, trying to give the old fart some dignity.
Jack finally got his breath. “Did you see him go by in the hall? He scuttled like.”
“Who?”
“Someone they sent.”
“Who’s they?”
“You know. Lyndon Johnson. Castro. They’ve sent someone to finish me. I think maybe it was Johnson himself. Real ugly. Real goddamn ugly.”
“Johnson’s dead,” Elvis said.
“That won’t stop him,” Jack said.
Later that morning, sunlight shooting into Elvis’s room through venetian blinds, Elvis put his hands behind his head and considered the night before while the pretty black nurse with the grapefruit tits salved his dick. He had reported Jack’s fall and the aides had come to help Jack back in bed, and him back on his walker. He had clumped back to his room (after being scolded for being out there that time of night) feeling that an air of strangeness had blown into the rest home, an air that wasn’t there the day before. It was at low ebb now, but certainly still present, humming in the background like some kind of generator ready to buzz up to a higher notch at a moment’s notice.
And he was certain it wasn’t just his imagination. The scuttling sound he’d heard last night, Jack had heard it, too. What was that all about? It wasn’t the sound of a walker, or a crip dragging their foot, or a wheelchair creeping along, it was something else, and now that he thought about it, it wasn’t exactly spider legs in gravel, more like a roll of barbed wire tumbling across tile.
Elvis was so wrapped up in these considerations, he lost awareness of the nurse until she said, “Mr. Haff!”
“What…?” He saw that she was smiling and looking down at her hands. He looked too. There, nestled in one of her gloved palms was a massive, blue-veined hooter with a pus-filled bump on it the size of a pecan. It was his hooter and his pus-filled bump.
“You ole rascal,” she said, and gently lowered his dick between his legs. “I think you better take a cold shower, Mr. Haff.”
Elvis was amazed. That was the first time in years he’d had a boner like that. What gave here?
Then he realized what gave. He wasn’t thinking about not being able to do it. He was thinking about something that interested him, and now, with something clicking around inside his head besides old memories and confusions, concerns about his next meal and going to the crapper, he had been given a dose of life again. He grinned his gums and what teeth were in them at the nurse.
“You get in there with me,” he said, “and I’ll take that shower.”
“You silly thing,” she said, and pulled his nightgown down and stood and removed her plastic gloves and dropped them in the trash can beside his bed.
“Why don’t you pull on it a little,” Elvis said.
“You ought to be ashamed,” the nurse said, but she smiled when she said it.
She left the room door open after she left. This concerned Elvis a little, but he felt his bed was at such an angle no one could look in, and if they did, tough luck. He wasn’t going to look a gift hard-on in the pee-hole. He pulled the sheet over him and pushed his hands beneath the sheets and got his gown pulled up over his belly. He took hold of his snake and began to choke it with one hand, running his thumb over the pus-filled bump. With his other hand, he fondled his balls. He thought of Priscilla and the pretty black nurse and Bull’s daughter and even the blue-haired fat lady with ELVIS tattooed on her butt, and he stroked harder and faster, and goddamn but he got stiffer and stiffer, and the bump on his cock gave up its load first, exploded hot pus down his thighs, and then his balls, which he thought forever empty, filled up with juice and electricity, and finally he threw the switch. The dam broke and the juice flew. He heard himself scream happily and felt hot wetness jetting down his legs, splattering as far as his big toes.
“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 Grove 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 Grove 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 three 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-too-scattered collage. “What’s loose?”
“It,” said Jack. “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’s 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.