Last Ride to Graceland by Kim Wright Read Free Book Online Page A

pocket, sailing through the air in one final high, free arc before hitting the hard red clay of home and shattering for good. I don’t know if this is the end of my life or the beginning—or both. Because some moments are like that, they kill you and birth you in the same breath. I throw my head back and watch the trees circle above me and I exhale, maybe for the first time since I left Memphis. I’m safe in the arms of a boy who is going to give me a second chance. And a third and fourth one too probably, before it’s all over. Because I’m safe in this world of infinite mercy, infinite forgiveness, infinite grace.
    And when you think of it like that, the truth doesn’t seem to matter all that much.

PART TWO
    Macon, Georgia

CORY
    May 30, 2015
    A t first I thought this car was a time capsule, but now I’m thinking it’s more of a treasure chest and that this bag of trash Leary threw together is the closest thing I have to a map. I’m like a pirate in reverse, somebody who’s found the gold and who’s now looking for the person who must have lost it. It’s a funny thing to find yourself telling a story backward, to have the end but not the beginning, to know the what of a situation, but not the how or why.
    I stop at a rest area about an hour outside of Beaufort and lay it all out across the passenger seat, trying to figure the route the Blackhawk must have taken thirty-seven years ago. The closest clue that I find, at least in terms of raw geography, is the Styrofoam cup with the lipstick smear. The side says JUICY LUCY in big, fat, graffiti-looking print, and below that are the much smaller words MACON, GEORGIA . And there’s a crumpled white bag, gone dark with time and grease that evidently came from the same establishment.
    What the trash suggests so far is that Mama took a serpentine route from Memphis to Beaufort, not cutting east to west along the more-or-less straight lines of the interstates, but rather scooping and weaving her way across the South, stopping in places as far-flung and illogical as Fairhope, Alabama. There’s a napkin from a barbecue joint there, the logo featuring one of those fat, grinning cartoon pigs that seems happy as hell to have ended life as somebody’s sandwich.
    I don’t need the crumpled map to tell me that Fairhope’s as far south as you can get without falling into the Gulf of Mexico. I remember one time Mama was singing that Cher song “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves” in the kitchen, and when she got to the part about “Picked up a boy just south of Mobile,” I said that didn’t make any sense, because Mobile’s right on the bay, with nothing lying past it but water. They must have pulled up that boy with a fishing line. But Mama was quite insistent. She got out the atlas and showed me there was a narrow lip of land stretching around the bay, like a backward C, with Mobile perched at the top and some little place called Fairhope down at the bottom. She paused as we looked at the map, her fingertip grazing the ragged outline of the coast, then she flicked at the page, the way you flick away an ant.
    â€œSo the boy who knocked Cher up must have come from Fairhope,” I said, partly because I could be a bit of a pissant when I was a kid and partly because Mama was always teaching me old song lyrics without bothering to explain what any of them meant. Mama liked Cher. She sang her all the time in the kitchen, especially the music from after she left Sonny.
    I study the map. Beaufort to Macon is pretty much astraight shot west. I can make it there before dark. Once I leave Macon, it’ll take that long, slow dip through the fattest parts of Georgia and Alabama to get me to Fairhope. From there the trail runs pretty much due north, going west just enough to scoop by Tupelo, Mississippi, where a receipt from the trash bag tells me Mama bought something from a roadside stand. Something marked just