Cadillac. It had been made in an era which prized size as well as style; you could probably settle down and raise a family in the car. Not that he had ever been in a position to find out. There hadn't been much time in his life for putting down roots.
He entered his code in the building's security system, and the automatic gates let him in. There was a uniformed guard—some ageing kid called Springsteen who was always hanging around, asking him questions about being an Op—but he was just for show. The machines ran the building.
Springsteen was busy just now, so Elvis was able to walk past him with just a hello. He was too tired for talk. He'd been driving hard, working off the adrenalin that had built up before the firefight. The swampy roads weren't busy, and he had had a clear route, passing only a few corp convoys and a solo cyker or two. Fassett had stopped banging after an hour, and it had been a quiet trip. Pushing 130 most of the way, he had made it from Yazoo to Memphis in just under two hours, crossing the state line at dawn. Of course, it had taken the rest of the day to deal with the Safe Route through the NoGo and to detour by the Federal Prisoner Depository.
Now, he just wanted to get some sleep. Tomorrow, he'd do his document work and sew up that bastard Fassett with the courts. He'd want to do a careful job. The CAF had pricey shysters backing them up. Then, he'd check his answering service and see if any more commissions were in the offing.
His funds were low, he knew. He ought to take a high-paying bodyguard or courier gig if he was going to finance another few Yazoo City actions. The trouble was that the people who most needed the help were the ones least able to afford it. And once you got a rep for being a Samaritan Op, you were overloaded with deserving and undeserving cases. It was a tough century, and someone had to look after his neighbours.
He had been born dirt-poor in a house that was just a few tarred boards the right side of a shack. His Pa had had so little in the way of education that he had misspelled his surviving son's middle name on his birth certificate. Elvis Aron. It was supposed to be Elvis Aaron. Often, he'd thought of getting it changed by deed poll, but that would mean admitting old Vernon had made a mistake. He wouldn't insult his Pa's memory that way.
He opened the door of his apartment, and stepped into the tiny hall. The first thing he saw was the only picture he had from the wild years before the army, a small framed photograph of him on stage, swivelling his hips, trying to keep hold of a guitar and a microphone at the same time. Behind him, you could see Bill Black twanging his bass. That had been when he and Bill and Scotty Moore were the Blue Moon Boys, doing the
Some said that Elvis Presley had gone to the Devil. Now, the Op wasn't so sure they hadn't been right.
The Op shucked his jacket, and carefully hung it up. He pulled off his shoulder holster, which was weighed down with three guns—a Colt Police Python for the left armpit, a G-Mek Finishing Touch automatic for the right, and a one-shot derringer for the small of the back—and hung that on the stand.
His frozen nineteen-year-old self yelled silently at him. What had the song been? 'That's All Right (Mama),' his first recording at Sun? 'Good Rockin' Tonight'? 'Mystery Train'? 'I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone'? The kid had the music in him, for sure, stronger than anything else. That felt remote, but he could dimly remember the urges that seemed to come directly from his gut as soon as puberty hit him. He chased girls like all the others, that was certain. But there was something else, another need, another drive. Some Preachers had called him an instrument of the Devil.
He broke away from the picture, and went into his studio. Slipping off his shoes, he sank onto his couch and, too tired to sleep, just stared…
The music had seemed to come out of him like blood spurting from a knifewound. It had been joyous, but there'd been pain too. He was full of the music like some of the backwoods preachers were full of the Word of the Lord, and he had to let it loose. Even when he sang gospel, people said the Devil was in his voice, in the movements of his hips.
The Devil's Music, they had called it. It had been called that forever. Any music that got inside people and stirred them up was in Satan's Top Forty. Elvis remembered the stories about Paganini having sold his soul for the music, and the things they still whispered about poor, lost, stabbed-through-the-heart-at-28 Robert Johnson.
And if the Devil didn't want his soul for himself, he sent Colonel Thomas Parker to claim it for Hell's side.
The Original Colonel.
Elvis loosened his shirt, and stabbed a button on the couch arm. The air conditioning kicked in, and he felt cool air on his chest.
He remembered the Colonel. And the Colonel's strange, money-doling shadow, Mr Seth.
Seth had been with the Colonel from the carnival days, always sponsoring the promoter, nurturing him for some unknown life's work. An old-time barker, on the payroll as one of the Colonel's many nebulous advisors, had told him a story about Parker's early days in showbusiness, about a band called Bob Willis and the Texas Playboys and about Colonel Parker's Dancing Chickens. Seth had told the Colonel that a country music show he was arranging would qualify as an agricultural event and thus not be liable for tax just so long as he had an animal act on the bill. What Parker did was put a hotplate in the bottom of a cage and cover it with straw. When it was plugged in and heated up, the band would play 'Turkey in the Straw' and the curtain would go up on a couple of chickens high-stepping to the music, their pain-squawks covered by the fast fiddling. When the chickens gave out, the Colonel would Southern-fry the fowl and serve them to hungry customers during the intermissions. One of the scary things about the Colonel was that he
Once he signed up with the Colonel in 1956, Elvis Presley had become just another Dancing Chicken, and the music thing had gone crazy.
Outside it was getting dark. Elvis turned the lights up, and stretched out on the couch, letting all the old pains fade away.
He had been yanked from Sun Records, where Sam Phillips—who said that a white man with a black sound would be worth a million dollars—had developed his style, and switched to RCA Victor, where he got his first taste of the corps. The hits came thick and fast— 'Heartbreak Hotel,' 'Blue Suede Shoes,' 'Hound Dog,' 'Don't Be Cruel,' 'All Shook Up'—and he'd been walked through some movies.
In the army, the music had receded. It seemed a lot less important somehow than learning to drive a tank. That had been just like driving the pick-up truck he had been working before the music hit big. Elvis had always loved to be behind the wheel of a powerful machine. That was one thing that never changed. At first, the army had been a circus, being shifted from unit to unit, his whereabouts guarded more jealously from the fans and the press man a secret weapon. Once billed as 'the Nation's Only Atomic Powered Singer,' he had found his military niche trucking nuclear weapons around testing sites in the desert. It made sense; the expected news clamp-down on the atomic tests also covered up his presence, and at last he was just another dogface GI, angling for some NCO insignia. People stopped asking him to sing in the barracks, and, surrounded for the first time by guys his own age rather than the Colonel's wrinkled carny cronies, he had started questioning the way his career was being handled.
Back then, everybody in his life wanted him to be something: Sam Phillips wanted him to be a white negro; Vernon and Gladys wanted him to be a movie star as big as The King, Clark Gable; Colonel Parker wanted him to be a younger Dean Martin who shat gold; the fans wanted him to take every girl in America between the ages of fourteen and nineteen into his bed; the TV censors wanted him to stop shaking his hips while he played and sang; Jerry Lee Lewis wanted him to die tragically and make way for a new King of Rock 'n' Roll; the Hollywood moguls wanted him to be the new James Dean, the new Marlon Brando, the new Cary Grant; Billy Graham and Jimmy Swaggart wanted him to stop, period, even if he swore only to sing Gospel, claiming the Sin wasn't so much in the words as it was in the music; and Mr Seth…well, Mr Seth wanted something he wasn't talking about…maybe, Mr Seth wanted his soul. Only the army seemed to be interested in him being just plain Elvis A. Presley, US 53310761.
He had all his records, boxed up and locked away, but he almost never got them out. He didn't even have a system that could play the 78s. Nobody else remembered any more, so why should he? If you turned on the rock stations, all you got was Petya Tcherkassoff, Vania Vanianova and all the other Soves who had copy-catted his
