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’ 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.”
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 grey 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 —
[2]— and vanished.
Elvis let go of the protective paper. It was dog shit. What was needed here was action.
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’ 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 pinata. 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’ 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’ 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 sulphurous 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’ 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’ 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 grey 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 Grove, 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.
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.
ALL IS WELL.
Elvis closed his eyes and did not open them again.
THE END
Mad Dog Summer
News, as opposed to rumor, didn’t travel the way it does now. Not back then. Not by radio or newspaper it didn’t. Not in East Texas. Things were different. What happened in another county was often left to that
