Losing Graceland Read Online Free PDF Page A

remembered at that moment he didn’t want to be her boyfriend anymore. He remembered she disgusted him.
    As the sun set, the old man awoke and asked where they were. He hated sleep. Always had. Saw it as a scrimmage for dying, because it came and you had no control over it, and then it showed nothingbut nightmares and fire. Whispers from the grave, the same whispers the old man figured all old men heard. Whispers of regret and guilt. No more chances. All used up.
    And the books. Goddammit, the books. They all spoke hogwash—life after death, reincarnation, transmigration and transmogrification. Would his soul occupy a tree somewhere in Tupelo? Or a dandelion in Cheektowaga? Would he be reborn into a baby in India? Or would he just lie in the ground and rot?
    Please no, he thought. Let me become a handsome young man on the beach. Sand between my toes and stomach fluttery from watching pretty little things walk by. Something good when I look in the mirror. Thick hair, tight skin, bronzed and beautiful; I’ll take that life at thirty. Forty, even. Hell, I’ll take it at fifty if that’s the best you can do.
    The old man figured even if there was a God he’d already forsaken His gift of life, so there may as well be nothing. He couldn’t say for certain what had happened to him—some nights he woke up gasping for air, covered in sweat, and he couldn’t remember his life. Maybe it was all fantasy, shoveling myth into the sinkholes riddling his age-addled mind. Maybe the hazy memories were hazy for a reason. Charlie Hodge had told him stories about his father, a victim of Alzheimer’s. How he claimed he’d fought in the Battle of Ieper in WWI when he’d actually been a cobbler on the Jersey Shore, deemed unfit for military service due to scoliosis.
    Jesus Fucking Christ
, the old man thought he remembered saying. Charlie, swear if that ever happens to me, you’ll put one between my eyes.
    Charlie promised but the old man knew they all made a lot of promises back then. When the world was their giant fried oyster. Before the great big lie. The whopper to end all whoppers. So bighe’d abandoned everyone and everything he knew. I must have needed it so bad, he thought, that I was willing to trade death for a life without my daughter. It must have been worse than I remember. If I remember.
    The map lay in Ben’s lap. The old man had traced the route with a red marker. The road rose and dipped, a narrow strip with a dirt shoulder and weeds on either side. Small homes set atop small lawns with garden sculptures of bent-over hausfraus in polka-dot underwear. The evening sky was hemmed in by overhanging trees.
    It was Monday and Ben thought about last Monday’s basketball game at the town park with Jim and Steve. Jim wore his favorite basketball shirt, picture of a jacked guy dunking on a hundred-foot rim. Samantha watched like she always did, feigning disinterest, gabbing on her cell and smoking her little black cigarettes, a bad habit she’d picked up last semester in Paris. One semester abroad and she came back a Francophile, and Steve figured she’d fucked some Frenchman but he was willing to let it slide because he said the thought of it kind of turned him on. Besides, Steve had said, I haven’t been one hundred percent faithful anyway. I slept with this girl at work. A little Asian hottie. I don’t know what it is about Cheesecake Factory, but they hire the hottest chicks.
    I can’t believe you cheated on Samantha, said Ben, and Steve grinned, waving to Samantha, who sat behind the pole at the end of the court, Indian-style, with a cellphone pressed to one ear, a thin trail of smoke rising from the little black cigarette pinched between her thumb and forefinger.
    Cheating on a hot girl sends the world a message, Steve said. Like you can trash a Ferrari because you got three others waiting in the garage.
    Ben thought about Carrie, the one girl he’d cheated on Jessica with. Had Carrie been a Ferrari? No—she was