As Gladys strides away from the house, taking delicious lungfuls of cold night air, she congratulates herself on making it this far. Her shoes are pinching but she can bear it. She is going out! This is her house, and she is free to leave it. The blue lights illuminate the way to the gate, and Gladys almost giggles, imagining herself yodelling and skipping down the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz. She’d seen the picture for a birthday treat with Elvis and Vernon at the Lyric, back in Tupelo. Stepping into the Lyric was not unlike stepping into Oz itself. There were plush red carpets, tubes of coloured lights seemed to drip down the walls, and huge swags of blue velvet framed the screen on three sides. What had made them all gasp was not the moment when the land turned technicoloured. After all, they were used to seeing the world in colour. It was the moment towards the end of the film, when it dawned on them that the faces around the bed were not only the faces of Dorothy’s loving family, but also of her fantastical friends. Her journey to Oz had been a dream and real, all at the same time. She’d been through the tornado and followed the yellow brick road, but she’d never left her loving family. Gladys had wept and wept.
The night is starlit and still, and the trees make no sound as she rounds the bend. She looks up at the bright moon, and understands why her son chooses to go out at night and sleep during the day. The darkness gives him freedom. In the dark, he is detached from the daily lives of others, and at liberty to do as he pleases.
Of course, Elvis would go plumb crazy if he knew his mama was planning to walk out of Graceland alone at this hour. And until this moment, Gladys hadn’t realised that she’d wanted to. Seeing the fans almost rip him clean in two, and hearing the stories of all the folks who consider her son one step away from the Devil, she’d been glad of the wall, the fence, the security gate and the length of their driveway. But right now she wants something else: to feel the grass beneath her feet; to have her hair curl in the damp night air; to walk along the street alone, without any notion of where she is headed.
Her nephew Harold’s light is burning in the gatehouse. He’s taken over from Vester for the night shift.
‘Howdy, Harold,’ calls Gladys, clip-clopping to his window.
Harold’s head jerks back, and he blinks at her, his swollen eyes a little pink.
She raps on the glass. ‘Open up so I can talk to you.’
Harold scrapes his hair into place, then slides the glass across.
‘Hi, Aunt Gladys,’ he says, with a sheepish grin, ‘Golly! Musta dropped off there.’
‘That’s OK, Harold. I just wanna go out the gate here. Can you open up for me, please?’
Harold’s smile falls. He scratches his cheek. ‘Why, Aunt Gladys, I ain’t too sure—’
‘Only, I’m having trouble sleeping, and I figure a little walk to that paddock over yonder is just the thing I need. I got a hankering to see the horses there. Seeing horses always eases my mind. You know what a country girl your old aunt is, don’t you?’
‘Does Uncle Vernon know about this?’
Gladys taps her foot. The leather of her pumps bites at her toes. ‘Sure he does, honey.’
Harold looks a little doubtful. ‘I ain’t certain Elvis would want you wandering out there all alone, ma’am.’
‘Elvis ain’t here. And you know he’d want his mama to be happy, don’t you? Now open up. I won’t be but fifteen minutes.’
With that, she steps back from the window, crosses her arms, and eyes the gates expectantly. It takes a few moments, and she can hear Harold muttering to himself, but eventually they swing open, and she trots through, head held high, waving at the gatehouse as she goes.
The empty highway is wide and black, the air faintly stained with the smell of gasoline. The electricity wires strung along the street give off a gentle hum, but otherwise there is no noise at all. Once she’s walked a little way along the grassy shoulder, away from Harold’s sight, Gladys pauses. Her shoes are rubbing badly now, and her initial burst of energy is wearing off, but she is still elated to have escaped. A single truck rumbles along the other side of the road, and she gazes after it, wondering what it would be like to hitch a ride across the state line. It’s been a while since she went back to East Tupelo. Lately Vernon doesn’t want to drive there, asking why in the world they would go visit some one-horse town when they live in the best mansion in Memphis.
She walks further, and the light dims. The highway stretches ahead, the dots of its lamps strung out for miles into the darkness. She knows the paddock is at the next turning in the road, but she can’t recall how far that is, having only been driven from the house by her son or her husband. She supposes it would all have been different if she’d learned to drive; she has the pink Cadillac that Elvis gave her, but she’s never dared to get herself behind the wheel. If she had, she might not be stumbling along the shoulder of the highway in these torturous shoes.
The cold air sneaks beneath the hem of her coat, and she pulls her collar tighter. She doesn’t care about seeing a horse, but if she can make it to the paddock then she’ll have proved something to herself. That she can walk alone. That she can do something more than sit and wait for Elvis to call.
She’s beyond the Graceland grounds now, and the trees to one side of her are thicker, the air damper. In an effort to keep her feet from freezing, she steps from the grass onto the edge of the highway, and remembers those nights back in East Tupelo, running along the shoulder after her sleepwalking boy.
Then she hears the rumble of an engine. A car is coming towards her, its headlights illuminating the trees, the rich texture of her coat, the crust of mud on her shoes. She puts a hand up to shield her eyes from the glare, and in the sudden brightness she imagines, just for a second, that her son is driving this car, that somehow he’s made it home from California already. The vehicle slows as it passes her, then pulls in a little way down the road.
Gladys stares at the tail lights, unsure whether to turn and run or to approach the car. The engine is still growling when the driver pokes his head out of the window.
‘You OK back there, ma’am?’ he calls.
In the gloom, she can’t make out much about him, but his voice sounds young.
‘Just fine, thank you,’ she calls back, not moving.
There’s a pause, then the tail lights turn white, and, with a high-pitched whine, the car reverses.
The man kills the engine and peers at her through the open window. He is thin and curly-haired, and holds a cigarette between his fingertips.
‘What you doing, wandering around out here at this hour, ma’am?’
‘Oh,’ says Gladys, trying to sound flippant, ‘just taking me some air, I guess!’
Glancing back, she can see the glow of blue light from her house. If this man means her harm, will Harold come running? Or has she gone too far for him to hear her scream?
‘You oughta be careful,’ says the man. ‘Can I offer you a ride someplace? Take you home, maybe?’
She judges him to be in his late thirties; younger than her. He’s unshaven but he looks clean enough. Bright-eyed, too, like the young Vernon.
‘Where you headed?’ she asks.
‘To work,’ he states. ‘Night shift. Don’t usually see nobody walking here, though.’
By the way his words slow as he leans across to get a better look at her, she suspects that he is beginning to realise who she is.
She giggles and removes her hands from her collar, so her coat slides open to the cool night. ‘Well,’ she says, smiling, ‘now you have.’
‘I sure have,’ he agrees, taking a drag on his cigarette. Then he thumps a hand on the dash. ‘Shoot! You ain’t out here looking for Elvis, are you, ma’am?’
Gladys freezes.
‘Like all them gals that line up outside those godawful gates down there?’ The man lets out a hoot of laughter. ‘You seen ’em? He’s got his own self on his own goddamn gates! I swear, you can take the boy out of Hicksville, but you sure can’t take Hicksville outta the boy. Still, maybe the army will knock some sense into him.’
Gladys draws her coat around her and drops her eyes.
The man shakes his head. ‘Naw. Course you ain’t. ’Scuse me, ma’am. I’m just foolin’.’
She tries to smile.
The man clears his throat. ‘Well, if you’re sure you gonna be all right …’
‘I live just over yonder,’ she says, pointing in the direction of the paddock.
‘Somebody waiting on you there?’
‘My husband.’
‘So long, then,’ he says, flicking his cigarette from the window. And he pulls away, leaving her to watch the red smears of the tail lights shrink to nothing.
When she arrives back at the mansion, Harold is standing between the open gates, shining his flashlight up and down the highway and exclaiming squeakily about all the terrible things that could have happened to his aunt.
Gladys pats him weakly on the arm. ‘Your aunt’s just a holy fool, is all.’
Then she takes off her shoes and limps up the driveway. With every step it’s as if another layer of skin has been stripped from her feet, and she looks back, almost expecting to see a trail of bloody footprints. But the driveway is clear, and Gladys continues her silent path back to the kitchen.