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

get the milkshake and the cook.
    I’m due for some luck and now, all of a sudden out of nowhere, I get a triple dose. The musician starts and he’s good, with enough sense to open with a little Bonnie Raitt, who hardly anybody remembers and practically everybody likes. The music soothes me and, more important, it soothes the Lucy dog, who curls up under the table and goes to sleep as if to confirm that it’s been a hell of a day and he for one would be happy to see the end of it. The milkshake shows up, complete with its bacon straw, and it’s the best damn thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. I don’t know if I’d pay $107 for it, but I’ll gladly pay $7 and I’m starting to relax a little bit, lulled into a sort of bluesy sugar trance, when the cook emerges and says that sure, yeah, of course he remembers the Juicy Lucy.
    â€œI don’t know what your mama told you,” he says, folding his arms across his big stomach, “and I hope I’m not speaking out of turn. But the Juicy wasn’t some family diner, it was a pothead place. Like a bar where people got high instead of drunk and the cops closed it down for good more than thirty years ago.”
    Well, that’s something to digest. Lucy’s woken up and I throw him half the bacon, which gets his tail wagging so hard that the whole table starts pulsating. “But it had food?” I ask, remembering the bag with that great circle of grease.
    â€œWell, sure it had food. Stoners gotta eat.” He laughs, but doesn’t unfold his arms. “Burgers and shit, but the food was just the cover. It was out by the airport. Not the airport airport, but one of those back roads that take you down to the shorter runways where the private planes land.” He looks at the server. “What’s the name of that road? The one where they found that poor little girl’s body last year?”
    â€œWhat poor little girl?” I ask. The musician is leafing through his music.
    â€œSome dead teenager,” says the cook. “All I’m saying is that there’s not a big call for urban development out that way. But that might work in your favor, since the odds are high the building’s still standing just like it was. It had this big pink and purple mermaid lady sprayed on the side like graffiti. You know, like that Beatles cartoon.”
    â€œ Yellow Submarine ?”
    â€œThat’s the one. Damned hippie place.” He moved toward the table, clicking an ink pen. “Here. Give me that napkin. I can’t remember the road name but I’ll draw you a map.”
    Perhaps at one time the phrase “private airport” conjured up images of status and exclusivity, but now the road that runs behind the main airport—which, as it ends up, has the completely unimaginative name Freight Road—holds nothing more than long-term parking lots, mechanics, a FedEx drop-off, and a couple of down-on-their-luck strip clubs, which claim to have BEER and GIRLS , but without showing any particular enthusiasm for either. I drive all the way to the very end and shine the Blackhawk’s lights into an overgrown field and there it is, just where the cook promised. A concrete building so engulfed in kudzu that you can barely make out the name. But the JUI is clear enough, as are pieces of the lady herself, one shoulder and both feet, so the cook did have that part wrong. She’s not a mermaid, she’s some sort of goddess.
    Either way, it’s hard to imagine my mother—or even the dark-eyed, smirking Honey of that old photograph—ever hanging out at a place like this. I can only assume that she originally entered the pink-painted door of the Juicy Lucy halfway through her tour with Elvis, when the Lisa Marie landed on one of these short runways and taxied into one of these small han­gars. I get Lucy out and let him pee. The headlights of the Blackhawk pump an arc of yellow-green light