Chapter 4

I jerked my head to look behind us, gently breaking away from Tucker while he was distracted. I could hear other people yelling, “El-vis! El-vis!” and see the crowd milling and parting at the north side of the quay, though not exactly what was going on. I glanced at the TV. It now showed a bright red pickup truck nosing its way on to the wharf, behind a fenced-off area. A lineup of people now stretched well into the walkways of the Old Port, trying to get in behind the truck.

The timer countdown now displayed 48 minutes and 57 seconds until show time.

The truck advanced slowly, driving along the edge of the quay. A line of fence separated it from the crowd, but it was a sheer drop into the St. Lawrence River on the other side. The long drive also gave us lots of time to admire the ELVIS LIVES logo and website emblazoned in large white letters along the truck’s hood and doors.

When the truck got to what seemed like spitting distance from me and Tucker, it pulled to a halt with the passenger door facing us. We could see Elvis faintly through the glass — or at least a guy with a black pompadour dressed in black — but not many details. A TV cameraman backed off to the east side of the quay. The flat screen TV’s livecast just showed the truck at a standstill, until the cameraman panned the crowd and our rapt expressions.

I held my breath, eyes fixed on the truck.

The music abruptly cut off the last seconds of “On the Floor” so that only a faint buzz emitted from the speakers.

I glanced at Tucker. He was taking a video of the whole thing with his monster camera, but I could see the tendons standing out in his neck and his temporal artery pulsating.

The truck’s passenger window smoothly rolled down. I assumed the wind had changed, and the rain had died down again, or else Elvis would have gotten soaked. Of course, he’d end up dunked in the St. Lawrence River pretty soon, anyway, so maybe he didn’t care about that.

Two guitar chords split the air, followed by two drum beats.

The crowd screamed. It took me that second to place the song: “Jailhouse Rock.” By Elvis Presley, of course. I had to laugh. What a perfect song to play before jailing yourself in a coffin.

Just as the first hollers of recognition died down, two feet kicked out of the open window, right on time with the next two guitar chords.

More screams, especially when the hips bumped out of the window, in time with the drum beats.

The next guitar chords brought one hand each on the window frame, and on the next two drum beats, Elvis hopped on to the concrete wharf, already lip-synching and swinging his hips, much like his idol.

And that wasn’t the only tribute to the past. I gave a delighted laugh at Elvis Serratore’s outfit. Although I only vaguely knew Elvis Presley from grainy YouTube videos, I recognized the black jeans, black jean jacket and horizontal black and white striped T-shirt. It seemed like a more dignified choice than the jumpsuits, since he was performing on Houdini’s death day.

Not that this was all about dignity. Elvis planted his legs wide apart, shot his arms in the air, and twitched his hips from side to side. The McGill students behind us screamed, whistled, and all but flashed their chests at him. A white-haired couple started to jive, which was cute. Tucker kept filming, silent and rapt.

Elvis II was more muscular than I’d thought from the blog photo, although still slim built. His pompadour was gelled more than Tucker’s, since it didn’t even shake while he danced, and I approved of the sideburns. He had an out-of-season tan and non-descript features hidden by sunglasses, so not as good looking as Elvis back in the day, but not too awful, either. You could imagine him singing “Hound Dog” on stage without embarrassing himself, especially when he flashed a big, slightly crooked smile.

Meanwhile, the driver drove the truck to the west side of the rectangular wharf, near the crane and, I couldn’t help thinking, so that the crowd and the cameras could feast on Elvis alone. Radio Canada, CTV, and two other stations had planted news crews on Elvis’s side of the fence. Must’ve been a slow news day.

When the driver climbed out of the truck, I recognized him as Elvis’s brother and manager, the one with an unusual name. Archer, that was it. He looked much older than Elvis—I would have guessed in his thirties—although maybe that was partly the wrinkles around his eyes and the few extra pounds around his waist. He signaled to the crane, and the operator gunned his engine.

The crane’s arm slowly lifted a large brown coffin into the air. The arm extended a good twenty-five feet skyward and rotated toward Elvis, who danced on the ground with the coffin dangling above his head.

I twitched. What if the coffin slipped off its hook and came crashing down on him?

The breath hissed out between Tucker’s teeth. He was using his camera screen, so I could see a miniature version of Elvis strutting beside me, as well as the live version in front of me, and the close-up of Elvis’s face on the flat-screen TV.

The crane gradually lowered the coffin to the concrete wharf behind Elvis. It settled with a loud thump. Elvis jumped on the lid and whipped his hips side to side for the final few beats of “Jailhouse Rock.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis is alive and well in Montreal, Canada!” called Archer, his voice amplified by a hands-free mike attached to his ear.

We all screamed our approval. If nothing else, they had an amazing sense of showmanship. I figured I’d gotten my $25 worth already.

“Let’s hear it for Elvis Serratore, the world’s most daring escape artist!”

We cheered some more. Elvis held two fingers up in a victory sign, and I laughed.

Archer said, “We drove all the way here from Winnipeg, Manitoba—”

A few Manitobans or Manitoban sympathizers whistled their approval.

“That’s right. All the way from Winnipeg to the heart of la belle province. In honour of Harry Houdini, the Prince of the Air, the greatest escape artist who ever lived, Elvis is going to perform one of the most dangerous stunts of all time.”

Elvis did a hip roll. He was such a card, it was hard to imagine him taking it seriously.

Still, I had to smile. Something about Elvis reminded me of Tucker. That playful spirit, that showmanship, that kind of willingness to look dumb or over the top, like a Labrador Retriever who just doesn’t care because he loves you so freaking much.

“Elvis will be chained with real, steel-link chain, padlocked and nailed into this coffin, before the crane lowers him into the St. Lawrence River. Elvis will have to fight his way free from the chains, the nails, the coffin, and the raging current of Mother Nature, in less than four minutes, before he runs out of oxygen or drowns or both. We will begin with the chains.”

A woman sashayed out of the truck, wearing only a tiger print bikini and orange stilettos, even though it had started to drizzle again. I shivered in sympathy. Her balloon-like breasts and deeply tanned skin would not keep her warm. Neither would the silver chains she kept bundled in her arms. She paraded toward Elvis, chains clinking and ass swaying. Somehow, it reminded me of the horse-drawn carriages I’d just admired, probably because the horses’ hooves clopped on the cobblestones and their bells jingled. Or maybe it was just the way she walked. My eyes kept straying to her ass.

“With the exquisite assistance of our beautiful Lucia, we will wrap Elvis the Escape Artist in not one, not five, but fifteen feet of chains! Would someone from the audience like to come test the chain, to make sure it’s real?”

“Me! Me!”

“Ai! Ici, Monsieur, on a un petit garçon…”

“Over here!”

“I’ll do it!”

“Meeeeeeee…”

All around us, people were stomping and whistling and jumping up and down with their hands in the air. Tucker looked agonized. I signaled that I would take the camera, and he held it still while I took it in my hands. Then he hollered and waved with both arms, “I LOVE ELVISSSSSSSS…”

It was a good ploy, but not good enough. Archer chose another guy, a six-foot bodybuilder type who marched right up to Lucia. She extended the end of the chain, displaying all her white teeth in a wide smile.

The bodybuilder said something.

Archer laughed and reported, “He says, ‘Is that all you’re going to give me?’”

Meh. But a good chunk of the crowd laughed.

The body builder made a great show of fingering the chain. He nodded, but signalled that he wanted more.

Lucia widened her eyes and checked with Elvis, and then Archer, before she let him pull an arm’s length of chain and inspect it, holding it up to the light, testing its weight, and yanking the chain links apart suddenly to see if it gave way.

It didn’t.

Tucker grinned as he filmed that. He’d already taken his camera back to continue recording, which was just as well. I had no idea what each little button did, especially with the camera covered in a translucent plastic bag.

The bodybuilder signalled for more chain. I had to admit, he was playing so much to the crowd, I wondered if he was a plant.

Lucia held up her arms, offering the chains. She couldn’t move that much, with an arm load of chains, but the well-developed muscles in her arms flexed and, of course, my eyes dropped to her cleavage again.

The bodybuilder stretched out another foot of chain. He yanked it again. He wrapped it around his own wrist. Then he unwrapped it and held it up to his face, eyeballing it again, before he brought it up to his mouth and tried to bite it.

Some of the crowd laughed, but most of us were getting antsy.

“Is he crazy?”

“Must be a friend of theirs.”

“Get off the stage!”

Archer stepped forward. “Let’s give a big hand to—” The bodybuilder said something, and Archer added, “Mr. Leo Karpinsky!”

We applauded. A few people whistled. Leo Karpinsky waved at the still-thickening crowd of maybe a thousand people, clearly relishing his fifteen seconds of fame, before he finally headed back into the crowd.

A saxophone broke out of the speakers in a funny, familiar riff. Elvis stepped up front and centre and danced around Lucia, placing his hands on her shoulders.

When it got to the chorus, “Return to Sender,” he peeled one arm out of his black jean jacket, swiftly followed by the other arm. He whipped the jacket like a helicopter blade before he let it fly in the truck’s general direction.

The McGill girls—and the rest of us—screeched our approval of the striptease, even though he didn’t reveal a lot of skin, but the top half of a wetsuit. It turned out that the black and white horizontally striped shirt underneath his jacket was actually part of the wetsuit.

Now that I thought about it, he’d get mighty drenched breaking out of a coffin underwater. And the St. Lawrence was bound to be chilly on the last day of October. Elvis had planned ahead.

Elvis danced around Lucia, pretending to write a letter and trying to hand it to her. When the chorus restarted, with “Return to sender,” he ripped off his jeans with a flourish. They were tearaway pants and came right off.

Now we were really hooting and hollering. A woman screeched, “Come to mama!”

I had a good laugh, but could hardly even hear myself because of all the cheering.

Elvis now wore just a wetsuit and slim-fitting black boots. He ceremoniously whipped off his sunglasses, provoking another round of screams. One woman pounded her chest like a gorilla.

Archer passed him a pair of gloves, which Elvis drew on to his hands, wiggling his fingers lasciviously, like a reverse striptease.

On the last beat of the song, Archer handed him a pair of goggles, which Elvis drew over the top half of his face, along with some sort of wetsuit hoodie to cover the top of his head and neck.

The goggles kind of ruined the look, but Elvis did a couple more hip thrusts, and we all yelled our approval even before horns, bass, a piano, and drums blasted out of the speakers for the next song.

The McGill girls began to dance, and Archer started winding the chain around Elvis’s right ankle. One of the news camera guys ran in front of us for a close up, and Tucker changed his angle, trying to maintain a good view.

Asher moved on to the left ankle while Elvis sang a song I didn’t know, but seemed to be called “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” A great song for wrapping a guy up in chains.

Asher drew the chain up in a single length between Elvis’s legs before wrapping his right wrist and his left wrist. Elvis had stopped dancing, but the girls around me were still making up for it, pouting and strutting and shaking their boot-ay.

Asher looped the chain around Elvis’s neck before securing it all with a small padlock. He didn’t ask anyone to check it first. I didn’t know if that was because it was a trick lock or because Mr. Leo Karpinski had been a bust. Or maybe it was just that they were running out of time. A quick glance at the clock showed only 19 minutes and 15 seconds before they had to get Elvis in the river.

With her hands freed of chains, the bikini girl made horrified faces and posed with her hands around her mouth. This made her breasts stand out even more. I glanced at Tucker, but he was mostly filming Elvis.

It started to rain harder. I glanced upward, but the bikini girl kept smiling, even though the raindrops dappled her mega-sprayed blondish hair.

When the song died down, Archer called, “Could I have another volunteer to check the padlock?”

Tucker elbowed me in the ribs, none too gently, but I shook my head and let the brunette McGill girl tug on the lock. She tried using both hands before she gave up, shook her head and laughed. She ran back to her friends, still laughing.

“Sheena, was that really real?” one of them called.

“Yeah, totally.”

“They didn’t ask you before?”

Someone else interrupted. “How could they? She was with us the whole time.”

“I got here late—”

“You’re always late.”

“Well, excuuuuuuse me.”

They all laughed. I smiled to myself. I remembered saying, “Well, excuuuuuse me!” when I was a kid, too.

Archer had already moved to the coffin that had been lying behind Elvis. He paused behind it. The bikini girl wrang her hands, forming her lips into a giant O, before another muscular guy helped Archer unhook the coffin from the crane and lower it to the ground.

The speakers started playing a drum roll.

Archer threw the coffin lid open.

Elvis shuffled toward the coffin, a little awkward in the chains. He gathered the vertical chains in his hands and slowly lowered his body into the coffin. He half-sat up, adjusting the chains, before he made himself lie vertically in the coffin.

Archer and the muscle guy fitted the lid over the coffin. Then Archer pulled a one-inch silver nail out of his pocket and flashed it at us. The muscle guy pulled a hammer off his tool belt and handed it to Archer. Archer and the muscle guy began hammering nails into the edges of the coffin.

I twitched uneasily. Even if you’re not claustrophobic, a coffin is a small space. Imagine getting nailed inside, while chained up, with a mask over your face.

The speakers started playing “Hound Dog,” which got the crowd moving again while Archer and the muscle guy finished nailing all the way around. I couldn’t figure out what “Hound Dog” had to do with anything, and I thought it kind of wrecked the spooky mood.

Archer stood up with the hammer in his hand. He held one nail in his left hand. “We now need a volunteer to help place the final nail into Elvis’s coffin.”

Talk about bad juju. My Chinese grandmothers would disapprove. Ryan’s grandmother would, too. I wondered how she was doing.

Tucker nudged me.

I muttered, “First, do no harm,” the opening of the Hippocratic Oath we took in medical school.

Tucker whispered, “You’re not harming him! You’re helping him! You’re giving him good publicity. He wants a pretty girl to help nail him in.”

I gave him the evil eye, but he grabbed my hand and held it aloft. For whatever reason, Archer pointed at me. “We have a volunteer in a blue raincoat!”

I made my way beside Archer, wondering if I should pull my hood off in order to make better TV. He’d probably have been better off choosing one of the other McGill girls. (Technically, I was a McGill girl, too, but my main connection to the university was just paying tuition for the privilege of working my ass off as a resident.) But at least I could wield a hammer. Ryan had helped me reinforce my previous apartment.

Up close, I could see the wrinkles around Archer’s eyes, and he smelled like Axe body spray. He smiled at me reassuringly and handed me the nail. I held it in my fingers, rolling it a little. It sure felt real to me.

Tucker had his camera glued to his face, but I could see him smiling under the camera body.

“Does the nail feel real to you, lady?”

I nodded. “Too real.”

Archer laughed and repeated that to the audience, earning a small laugh.

I didn’t bother biting the nail, or pantomiming horror, but I smiled widely for the many cameras. Then I took the hammer in my right fist and placed the nail at the top of the coffin, where Archer discreetly pointed. The nails were spaced about six inches apart, and I could see where they’d sunk into the edges of wood. It looked genuine to me.

I tapped the nail head with the hammer, driving its point into the wood, making sure it stood upright. Then I drove it home with a single good blow.

The crowd cheered. Archer smiled and took the hammer from me. I pretended to curtsey and made my way back to the audience while the truck backed up the wharf toward us. The muscle guy killed the engine and emerged from the driver’s seat with two concrete blocks. The bikini girl popped out of the passenger seat holding another armload of chains.

Safely behind the fence again, I watched them attach chains over the coffin, one big chain lengthwise and four chains looped horizontally. Plus they attached two concrete blocks each on two of those horizontal chains, weighing the coffin down, not to mention making those chains harder to open.

I licked my lips. Elvis kept adding more layers of danger, when my instinct was more like, Stay home! Read a good book! Brush your teeth! Wear your seatbelt!

Tucker was still grinning, but sometimes I thought Tucker had a screw loose.

Archer and the muscle guy finished hooking the coffin on to the end of the crane’s hook. The hook pulley’s case was covered in yellow and black diagonal stripes. For a crazy second, I thought they should have gotten black and white horizontal stripes to match Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock” wetsuit.

The bikini girl posed with her hands to her mouth and her hip cocked to one side, like an old-fashioned pin-up ad miming horror.

And the muscle guy climbed into the cab of the crane. The crane’s engine rumbled and coughed exhaust.

Elvis Presley started up one more time, but even though the tune was as bouncy as ever, he sang more seriously, the lyrics basically saying, Stop. Don’t do this.

My heart beat in my throat. Even Elvis Presley voted against the daredeviling. Okay, that was their job, to scare some of us, inspire some of us, and thrill us all. It was like a car accident, I guess. I couldn’t look away, but I didn’t want to look.

The coffin rose slowly in the air, high above our heads. The wind picked up, but the coffin hardly swayed, weighed down by the concrete blocks.

“Maudite…”

“You think he’s going to be okay?”

“He’s gotta be okay! It’s Elvis!”

“Yeah, but the other Elvis is dead.”

“No, he’s alive. Elvis lives, remember?”

“He’s alive in the Sookie Stackhouse books, anyway.”

“Yeah, but he’s not in True Blood. That sucks.”

“What about the figure skater, Elvis Stojko? He’s still alive.”

“I love Elvis Stojko! You remember his martial arts routine?”

“Right on!”

A woman started singing along with the Elvis Presley song in a high, thin voice. Apparently, it was called “Witchcraft.” If nothing else, I’d learned a bunch of new Elvis songs this afternoon. Still, I thought it was disrespectful that they weren’t even paying attention to the Elvis in front of them until the crane’s engine rumbled and its arm swung toward the river, almost gracefully suspending the coffin above the waves.

I heard the breath catch in Tucker’s throat. He kept filming.

The crane slowly lowered the coffin into the river. The bikini girl jumped up and down, pointing to the flat screen TV. I was momentarily mesmerized by her bouncing attributes, but the rest of the crowd cued in to the clock countdown and started counting in English.

“Ten.”

“Nine.”

“Eight.”

The coffin disappeared from our sight, but we could watch it on the monitor. I felt like grabbing on to something like Tucker’s hand, but he was still filming away, although he was grimacing. I glanced at his screen and noticed the battery icon flashing.

“Three.”

“TWO.”

“ONE.”

I heard, or imagined I heard, the splash as the coffin disappeared under the waves.