Free Rumors from the Lost World by Alan Davis Page A

and go , honey, that’s our motto. Right, sweetheart? You listening, honey?”
    At the cemetery plot, where her mother takes the girl to keep a promise, her daddy’s grave is marked with some plastic yellow daisies in a mayonnaise jar. They put them there the day they crunched into town. The flowers are very old, but they haven’t lost their color. The girl wipes the petals free of dust with the hem of her long shirt.
    An Elvis look-alike is standing one grave over, with his back to them as though waiting for a bus. Her mother flounces her evil eye his way, cracking open her jaw, breathing through her nose like a retard, making the noise a dragon might make until the girl smiles. “Even down to the boots,” her mother whispers. “What’s he doing here? Why’s he waiting on us? You think he’s got much cash?” She glances quickly at any gravestone in the vicinity large enough to hide a body behind. In any graveyard, she once told the girl, even the one where her daddy is buried, especially that one maybe, she expects the Voodoo Queen or someone alive and grassy to rise from the mud.
    The Elvis look-alike seems unaware of them, scratches his scalp and shifts his weight. He’s wearing skinny-toed cowboy boots the color of a snake. Her mother is having her fit in slow-motion, leaning over the grave, staring past the dates as though she can’t figure them out. “They not gonna change,” the girl says. “It ain’t a cash register.”
    â€œYou can say that again,” her mother says. “Your daddy was anything but a money machine. He was sure good at laying down and waiting for me to take care of him though, wasn’t he? I don’t have to go on about that , do I?” She leaps like a disco queen to the raised mound where the girl’s daddy is sleeping and knocks over the flowers in the process. For a minute the girl cringes, thinking her mother is going into one of her danceplays. The girl’s lived with them for years, they can happen anytime, at a pizza place, a motel, a backalley bar, a playground. Her mother pretends she’s like listening to the world and letting the world make her move, throwing her arms about, collapsing in a fit, like the Lord’s touched her or something even worse.
    Instead, she hitches up her skirt and circles the mound as though wrestling with her husband’s ghost, then moseys close to the little Elvis. “Boo,” she says.
    He jumps a mile and a quarter. “Good God, woman, you queer or something? You like to raise the dead?”
    She gives him her devil-smile. “Looks to me like the dead’s already up and about.”
    â€œSneak up like that in a place like this? Good grief.” He don’t sound nothing like Elvis when he talks. His voice is high and greasy and quakes a little like it needs to be oiled. He rattles his head, still taking in the sight of the girl’s mother in a lowcut T-shirt. His Elvis hair falls into prince charming bangs, straight across his eyes. It’s all spruced up and blue so the girl thinks of a blue moon, but he’s almost a kid, more her age than her mother’s. It turns out his own mother lives in the ground, his words, right next door to the girl’s daddy. What a riot, the little Elvis says, all of us being so close together like that. He begins jawboning with the mother, the two of them swaying in rhythm like saplings.
    Her daddy’s a whole lot nicer now that he’s dead. The girl can tell him anything and he listens. His grave still looks fresh, each letter chiseled neatly into the stone, and the grass is clipped. It’s like a national park. All the neighbors are quiet and everything, and it’s all paid for. The only thing your daddy’s benefits covered was final expenses, her mother likes to say, at least he gets to rest easy now. Even with her mother chattering to the little Elvis, working him up, the girl can