The Best of Joe R. Lansdale by Joe R. Lansdale Read Free Book Online

in the bed. (Famous last words.)
    Elvis sat up and hung his feet over the side of the bed and the bed swung far to the left and around the ceiling and back, and then it wasn’t moving at all. The dizziness passed.
    Elvis looked at his walker and sighed, leaned forward, took hold of the grips and eased himself off the bed and clumped the rubber padded tips forward, and made for the toilet.
    He was in the process of milking his bump-swollen weasel, when he heard something in the hallway — a kind of scrambling, like a big spider scuttling about in a box of gravel.
    There was always some sound in the hallway, people coming and going, yelling in pain or confusion, but this time of night, three A.M. , was normally quite dead.
    It shouldn’t have concerned him, but the truth of the matter was, now that he was up and had successfully pissed in the pot, he was no longer sleepy; he was still thinking about that bimbo, Callie, and the nurse (What the hell was her name?) with the tits like grapefruits, and all they had said.
    Elvis stumped his walker backwards out of the bathroom, turned it, made his way forward into the hall. The hall was semi-dark, with every other light out, and the lights that were on were dimmed to a watery egg yoke yellow. The black and white tile floor looked like a great chessboard, waxed and buffed for the next game of life, and here he was, a semi-crippled pawn, ready to go. Off in the far wing of the home, Old Lady McGee, better known in the home as The Blue Yodeler, broke into one of her famous yodels (she claimed to have sung with a country and western band in her youth), then ceased abruptly. Elvis swung the walker forward and moved on. He hadn’t been out of his room in ages, and he hadn’t been out of his bed much either. Tonight, he felt invigorated because he hadn’t pissed his bed, and he’d heard the sound again, the spider in the box of gravel. (Big spider. Big box. Lots of gravel.) And following the sound gave him something to do.
    Elvis rounded the corner, beads of sweat popping out on his forehead like heat blisters. Jesus. He wasn’t invigorated now. Thinking about how invigorated he was had bushed him. Still, going back to his room to lie on his bed and wait for morning so he could wait for noon, then afternoon and night, didn’t appeal to him.
    He went by Jack McLaughlin’s room, the fellow who was convinced he was John F. Kennedy, and that his brain was in the White House running on batteries. The door to Jack’s room was open. Elvis peeked in as he moved by, knowing full well that Jack might not want to see him. Sometimes he accepted Elvis as the real Elvis, and when he did, he got scared, saying it was Elvis who had been behind the assassination.
    Actually, Elvis hoped he felt that way tonight. It would at least be some acknowledgment that he was who he was, even if the acknowledgment was a fearful shriek from a nut.
    ‘Course
, Elvis thought,
maybe I’m nuts too. Maybe I am Sebastian Haff and I fell off the stage and broke more than my hip, cracked some part of my brain that lost my old self and made me think I’m Elvis
.
    No. He couldn’t believe that. That’s the way they wanted him to think. They wanted him to believe he was nuts and he wasn’t Elvis, just some sad old fart who had once lived out part of another man’s life because he had none of his own.
    He wouldn’t accept that. He wasn’t Sebastian Haff. He was Elvis Goddamn Aaron Fucking Presley with a boil on his dick.
    ‘Course, he believed that, maybe he ought to believe Jack was John F. Kennedy, and Mums Delay, another patient here at Shady Grove, was Dillinger. Then again, maybe not. They were kind of scanty on evidence. He at least looked like Elvis gone old and sick. Jack was black — he claimed The Powers That Be had dyed him that color to keep him hidden — and Mums was a woman who claimed she’d had a sex change operation.
    Jesus, was this a rest home or a nut house?
    Jack’s room was one of the