Elvis is Coming

Master Combat Sargeant Elvis Kneel was discharged from his third tour of active duty so he could go to the multi-person funeral of his wife and daughters. The Army asked that he leave his duty guns in a secured check with a padlock and a combination given to his squadron commander. The newspapers knew that a scarred and tenacious freak was coming home but they simply reported that the women were survived by their husband and father.

The Mayor thought it was a good time to appoint a Vice Mayor if anyone would like the fringe benefit of unlimited Starbuck’s carafe coffee. “Just take notes for any phone calls and pressing business. It’s very simple.”

Appointed Vice-Mayor Stephanie Woodrow was new to town and didn’t know that Elvis Kneel was an expert in Psych Ops before the age of ten. He had singlehandedly trained all the gang members of Soledad to be obedient inmates and had one missing tooth from pulling a truck out of the mud with his mouth for a Senior Class Project. The project, titled “John Henry,” challenged technology against the human condition.

The human condition stepped up to the gravesites and took a handful of dirt from each mound and gave thanksgiving as the earth sieved from his fingers to the heads of his ladies. He had failed to protect any of his Dependents.

There was a man down in County still howling for a beer until he was firmly convicted. This man didn’t believe that he had killed anyone and kept swearing that he read INNOCENT till proven … “Now get me a beer.”

The jailkeepers were so tired of his fits for a beer that they considered taping a mask to his face. Considered spraying the prisoner with Lysol or bunking him with a real killer. Except, the hospital had only sterilized the cuts and sewn the side of his chest cavity. They had not been allotted the extra time to sponge bath the body since he was cuffed the whole time and fidgeting after 5-thousandths CC of local-A. This man, Gil Plankton, was so odoriferous that no one could share a cell, let alone throw a blow without losing their lunch. Gil had shat himself three days yore and didn’t even notice.

“Give me a beer!”

He was rattling the cage as Elvis was buzzed in, despite some hesitation; small town. “Now Elvis, remember...”

Elvis put his black duffel bag down and looked tired beyond measure. He had to duck to get under the six foot eight hallways door. Elvis was pointed to the last cell in row 3 because no one wanted to escort him to hell and they didn’t care what he kept in his cargo pants because it was a small town and maybe they’d all have the bathroom runs at once.

“You got a beer?”

Elvis looked over his target. Gil was burley with sunken eyes, dirty long blonded hair and the wrist of a man who never won a wrestling match. His plaid shirt was missing buttons and the mess in the corner showed a man whose liver had confused bile for breakfast. Gil smooshed his face into as many bars as he could get. “Just give me some sauce?”

Elvis fetched his nostrils, pinched them close with the left hand and reached into his side sleeve for a tiny flask with a cross. He poured the holy oil over the man’s tongue. Over his nose expressed throught the iron cage. He whipped the last bit of the flask so that it splattered over the dead man’s face; raindrops which sizzled on the skin.

This man hissed, positively licked the bars and said he would suck-off Elvis for a drink or none. “Come on big boy.”

It hurt to see so wicked a thing in a man. Like the child of God had fallen to the socks and the creature which took over was unrecognizable, an image of a person in negative, a scourge of vitriol and the gnashing of teeth.

The abomination of desolation in a person. The Refuse.

Elvis dropped to his knee and clasped his hands and closed his eyes as the lamp swung wildly in the hall, an indoor wind unreleased, the prisoner baiting, hissing, playing with his eye socket like he could suck seminole fluid; A demonic darling no more.

Gil screamed when Elvis invoked the name of the Lord. He really hissed and squirmed and the prisoners two cells aft were afraid of the cold air, the feeling before the quake, the stillness before a forest murder. Master Combat Sergeant Elvis Kneel was also the Chaplain, the man who held fresh bodies who lost their halves, the way accidental cowards trust his truth, the digger of a hundred foxholes which were filled by people who used to be individuals, thus skinned to their deepest needs.

People commit to a cause but persist by personality. It was hard to say what made some people lechers and the other leaders. It could be booze, pills or love junkies in the same platoon. A torta _testudo_ reduced to its weakest member. Elvis came to sit in triangular resting position, humming psalms.

Amazing grace (how sweet the sound) that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.

Elvis bit the side of his interlinked palms, salt coming to his mouth as the reminder of tears, the family had graduated to a higher place and now this man’s salvation?

Even while we were his enemy he died for us.

In the corner of the cell between the bed and the toilet Gil was shrinking. He no longer accepted this man could give him a beer but felt the slow memory of driving wrong in the rain. That small memory of a full frontal collision, the stuff that haunts people when they realize what was real, what is real, the guts congeal to hot acid humidity, escaping through every orifice, the moment of empathy and one is grateful for low light and a lack of mirrors.

“You don’t have my beer.”

This was a weary expression passed between two souls who weren’t talking about beer. The fingernails of Gilbert felt the tactile indifference of the floor pocked with small volcano bumps. How the wicked need no pillows. How the patient wait for God’s wrath to subside, the God of Justice is helping up the footstool, comforting the hated heart with the sweet words, “I will remember this no more.”

Gil appeared bomb-blasted about the eyes. Elvis feared that he had loved too much? No. Disasters happen everyday. Sometimes he is called to make a disaster. There is no beauty in saying 'why' or 'how' but feel the affects of super-natural potentiality when one says, “Have I endured, Dear Lord? I am ready for the end.”

This was all an internal confession because the face of Elvis was strained, tired, cleft of purpose, and waiting for divine instructions because it would be so very easy to end this… man.

Gil turned into the dank wall, touched the plaster with no heartbeat, and caressed the desperate scrawl of the indigent who had been jailed before. There was no light or want to find a last confession, a Sinner’s Prayer left by the sober before him, the needful one who found that love is sweetly broken.

2.

All the town scurried to put their children to bed, to turn on the babysitting televisions, to lace up their travel boots and gather as one body of people who had been affected by their returning son. Some of the men put on dark glasses to hold back tears. They sword to light a cocktail party at the Marina Club, to mandate tavern owners to afford a taxi, and they believed it could have been any family there… wiped out by a drunk.

This was Vice Mayor Stephanie’s first unofficial mob and she brought a whistle and raised up a white paperback copy of To Kill A Mockingbird. She had to introduce herself as a first-year and that “Uncle Bruce probably should have warned me that Elvis was coming home…”

The historical hospitality was gone. She needed to get her tiny little jacksy out of the way.

“Bruce said something of you people… for years! For YEARS my uncle, your Mayor, has told me a hundred times that he is so proud of how you all help each other in any disaster… IT SENDS ME TO THE FLOOR…”

One of the men in a shadow hat picked up VM Woodrow and lifted her, pivoted, and the mob regained their footing. They silently walked to the country jail which was just past the highway overpass on the last corner of town before the dunes. They funneled into the reception area, many hours after hours, the nightguard swallowed hard because he was simply vying for a union job and there were hundreds? There werwe so many faces at his door that he couldn’t count. They grew calm and angry as they buzzed his door over and over.

There was no one to call when he saw his boss out of uniform about five rows back in the crowd. Not Good. He remembered telling himself, “Not good.” before he punched in the code for the hallway doors and let the town file in like a black friday event.

They came in with red eyes and people of every creed and color. They came in with crinkles in the middle of their foreheads, some with BBQ Briquets fighting symbols on their cheeks. Some with plastic gloves. Some with garbage bags.

Not good.

There is no day of mourning when the prettiest family on the prettiest block with the prettiest flowers fit for any season get pulverized on the main boulevard of your town. There is a public feeling of self loathing, rethinking any reason one would live in a small town of commuters, barely balancing its bedroom status always aware of why you work so hard to keep away the crime of those cities. The innards yearn for peace again, a sweet release to choke the blythe spirit pretending the day is dawn when its not even drawn.

The neighbors of Elvis Kneel packed into the detention center ready to forget what they would do once they forgot what had been done.

Their soldier was face down on the floor his head exposed to the prisoner. They demanded that the night watchmen come and open the cell. This took some time because he was not the sort of lean to weave into the tapestry of people. Gil-the-killer huddled in his corner still feeling the scratches of the man who left before him.

“On your feet!”

It was quick work for the man to be moshed by the crowd who drug him over the dune to the Great Pacific, the ocean of calm, the sea of plenty. There was a riptide near the gentle waves of the bay, this shoved up muck from the bed below and beckoned the citizens just to throw their trash out like all their grandparents had done before them.

“Kneel!”

Gil didn’t have time to obciesce because he was pushed down by the men with sunglasses, and worked over by the women with plastic gloves. He was stripped of his clothing as the waters penetrated the thick layers of mire. These were hastily thrown into the plastic bags provided and the Hindus and the Buddhists and even the nonbeleivers saw the great value of a baptism by water for the worst of us.

Some offered that he should be held down for three minutes because he was three times over the legal limit. Some argued for quarantine and deportation, but no one seriously argued for his life. It was not their position that he should be redeemed.

Just then the crowd parted as a humongous man came over the Dune. Master Combat Sergeant Chaplain Elvis Kneel was holding what looked like a black kite. The sense of rat-justice overcame more than one person as they inwardly grinned. They didn’t gossip about the empty house coming up for sale, the missing children for next week's school pictures, or the way that every parent has for some reason felt defeated.

The Champion came down the hill with his cleft chin and his chiseled stomach. He came down with piercing blue-gray eyes which were fogged as if by trance, by holy purpose, by primal rite! They moved aside.

Elvis the man, the gland who had known a dozen years of joy, thrust his gigantic arm into the sea and brought up the prisoner, put his

liturgical robe around this brother, kissed his forehead, and explained, “You are loved. “

It is well with me... I hope.