Crawling Between Heaven and Earth

Elvis Died for Your Sins

Every year, when I catch the flu, I lose about two weeks of work to sitting in a truly enormous arm chair in my office and reading whatever is within easy reach. A victim of laziness and viruses, I have—literally found myself reading nineteenth century biology school books rather than getting up and finding more congenial reading material in my bookshelves. My friends and family are onto me. If they find a book they want me to read, they’ll set it by my chair when I get sick. I think my friend who left the biography of Elvis Presley by my chair didn’t do it on purpose. However, I still read it. And, since the quasi deification of Elvis Presley has always fascinated me, this story emerged.

Mid afternoon in Eternal Life, the only New Age Store in Lythia Springs, Colorado, tended to be quiet.

We were through with the lunch-time rush of power-vegetarian-executives and not yet up to the late-afternoon rush of college students in search of books on the Hermetic Order Of the Golden Dawn or those convenient Ouija board kits.

I’d taken my sandals off, grabbed a rice-cream popsicle from the freezer at the back of the store and sat down in the window seat behind the magical-crystal-jewelry counter, with my knees drawn up and the long skirt of my Indian print dress demurely drawn down to hide all but my toes.

My eyes half closed, I heard the rumbling talk coming from the book section.

“Archetypes can come alive. You really must read this book, it takes the thesis of the Golden Bough one step further. You know, the one about the divinization of dead chieftains. It maintains that not only did humanity worship these… beings, but that they were actually called into existence by this worship and assumed, not the flawed mortal envelopes in which they had truly existed, but perfect archetypes.”

A male voice. Probably a college professor, I thought, from the boring, slow, “I’m going to impart this knowledge whether you want it or not” tone. My first husband had been a college professor. I made a face at the memory.

“Oh, you mean they would take the form expected of them, like John Keel claims happens with UFOs and men in black and fairies…” A young woman’s voice. Buttering the guy up for the kill? Trust me, honey, not worth it.

“Yes, in a way. They’re brought to life by the collective subconscious. Perhaps they existed in another form, some spiritual form.” A bout of nervous laughter. “I’m not sure I like the idea of all those idolized rock stars and actors walking around long after death, not even in archetype form. And yet, the idea is so elegant, like something out of Jung, something resonating of the shared collective subconscious”

He continued, on and on, in slow, rolling language, full of names and quotes. His female companion listened in silence and presumed raptness. I sighed and ate my rice-cream and kept my mouth shut. The pickups that took place in this store were as unusual as everything else.

“Mariann?”

I opened my eyes.

My boss, Elroy Peters, owner of Eternal Life, stood by the batik curtain that hid the store area from our warehouse and staff kitchen, what had once been the servants quarters of this converted Victorian. A tall man with snow-white hair, thin to the point of gauntness, Elroy stood as always with his hip tilted to one side and his lower lip poked out, in a way that reminded me of someone, but I could never make out whom. His pruned old face showed. “Hasn’t Jonni shown up yet?”

I shook my head.

“Wasn’t she supposed to have been here at ten?”

I nodded.

“It’s not like her,” Elroy said. “She might be many things, but she’s also punctual to the minute.” He normally spoke in an odd way that Jonni called “chewing on the words.” Agitation made it even worse, and brought out his too-perfect-to-be-true good-ol’boy southern accent.

And he had some reason to be agitated. Jonni, our resident college-student-ditsy-blonde, had never been this late. And Elroy, rightly or wrongly, thought that he was responsible for all of us.

“I’ve called her,” I said. “But there was no answer.”

Elroy frowned, threw back a white cowlick. “Mark supposed to come in?”

“At two,” I said.

“Tell me when he gets in…maybe we can go out and see if there’s anything wrong with Jonni.” He disappeared into the back, so fast that he gave the impression of walking through the virulently colored batik curtain.

“Miss?” a young man’s voice.

I turned away from the curtain that hung motionless, as though no one had gone near it, and looked at the young man who stood at the other end of the counter. “Yes?”

“I’m… I’m not sure how to put this,” he said. He had wild green eyes and wilder hair and beard in a shade of red not normally seen outside Crayola boxes. His voice came out in odd fits and starts. “But… my spirit just took over this body. I’m an advanced soul from the Gorianth sphere and I’m here to lead humanity, but I’m not sure”

Ah, a walk-in. Our daily bread. I took a final bite of my rice-cream. “You want walk-ins. Book section. Fourth set of shelves to the right, in the sunroom area. We have several books that will give you further insight into humanity on Earth and what you’re expected to tell them.”

“Thanks,” he said, flashing odd metal-capped teeth.

I watched his retreating back for so long that I missed Mark’s approach until he came behind the counter and almost within touching distance. “Problem?” he asked.

“Nah,” I said. “A walk-in. From the Gorianth sphere.”

Mark raised his perfect black eyebrows over his bright blue eyes. “No kidding. Another one? It’s the tenth since the psychic fair.”

“Yeah.” I looked at the stick for my rice-cream. The licked clean stick said LIFE IS SENSELESS WITHOUT BELIEF. Well, then, I thought to myself, I shouldn’t work at a New Age store. Nothing jaded you quicker. “Elroy wanted to know when you came in.”

Mark frowned. He took off his bright blue tapestry jacket, shoved it out of sight under the counter. “Why?”

“Jonni hasn’t come in. I think he had some idea of going out and checking on her.”

“She had an argument with her boyfriend last night,” Mark said, pulling out the schedule sheet to write in the time he’d arrived. “At the Catering Turnip.”

Mark played his acoustic guitar and sang his own songs at the Catering Turnip, a vegetarian restaurant. He was such a nice guy I’d never had the courage to tell him that he was too late to be the next Bob Dylan. Even Bob Dylan didn’t want to be Bob Dylan anymore.

“Big row,” he said, looking up at the clock on the wall and writing down a time ten minutes earlier. “He left her to pick up the check, and she didn’t have any cash and I had to lend her money. She left in tears. I expected to hear the entire soap opera today.”

I found my sandals with my feet. It didn’t sound good. As I made my way to the back I thought that the more I heard about this, the less I liked it. Jonni always took her boyfriends so seriously and she picked them with the same recklessness that led other people to play Russian roulette. “If the guy who wants to be possessed calls, tell him we don’t have any particular relationship with supernatural entities and he’ll have to find his own way to damnation,” I told Mark just before I ducked through the batik curtain.

“What?” he asked, for once surprised.

“Some guy who wants instructions on how to become possessed,” I said. “He’s trying to get over a fundamentalist upbringing, he says. He called five times this morning. Probably will call again, trying to get a different answer.”

Mark gave me a bewildered half smile, as if not sure whether to believe me.

I opened the batik curtain and went it, letting it swing closed behind me.

Elroy was half-hidden by a pile of cardboard boxes marked with BLUE GREEN ALGAE. HANDLE WITH CARE.

“Mark is here,” I told him. “If you want to go out or whatever.”

“Come with me,” he said. “To take care of business.”

I hesitated. Like everyone in this store, Elroy was all right but slightly different, like his whole concept of reality hung slightly askew. And I had never fully got over the impression that one day one of them was going to pull out a big ritual knife and sacrifice me to the god or goddess of his or her choice.

“In case I need help, young un. Come on.”

“You could take Mark,” I demurred.

But Elroy shook his head. “And leave you here alone? Not right for a young lady.”

After two failed marriages and in my mid-thirties, I didn’t really feel like a young lady, but I bit back my response. I didn’t particularly want to hang around and talk to the possession aspirant, either.

I made a quick detour to inform Mark that I’d be going with Elroy and left through the front door.

Elroy waited in the parking lot, warming up his car, a white Eldorado with huge tail fins and pink accents.

Inside, teddy bears in pastel colors filled all except the driver’s seat. I tried not to bat an eye as I said, people at Eternal Life store were odd and started to push the teddy bears off the seat onto the floor. Elroy gave me a freezing glare, took the teddy bears and put them in the backseat, next to ten hundred or so of their near relatives.

“You know where Jonni lives?” I asked, as he started up his car.

He nodded and mumbled, “Employment application.”

As though he thought I’d suspect him of an illicit affair with Jonni, who must be all of seventeen. I told him about what Mark had said of Jonni, to forestall any more such nonsense.

We drove deeper into the old Victorian district of Lythia Springs, past the zone where houses were converted into shops, through the zone where the houses were houses, each one with a tended lawn to rival the most conventional of suburbs and on to the zone of houses chopped up into apartments, with beer cans on the window sills, and dried-up, dusty front yards.

Elroy pulled up in front of a narrow, violet townhouse.

As he got out of the car, the sun shone on his belt buckle, a huge gold-and-fake-jewels affair with the initials EP picked out in would-be rubies. I shook my head. I’d never noticed the thing. Then again, I didn’t normally go around staring at my boss’s belt buckle.

I walked up the maltreated concrete steps to the violet door. Elroy looked in the fly-specked window to the left. “Too dirty,” he mumbled. “Can’t see a darn thing.”

I rang the bell, tried the massive brass doorknob.

“Is it open?” Elroy asked.

“No,” I said, giving the doorknob a final shove.

“Here,” he said. “Let me try.”

“Be my guest.” I stepped back and he took my place. The sun shone off something, probably his belt buckle, enveloping the knob in a blinding white light. He turned it. “It was unlocked after all.”

The door opened with a mighty creak.

I frowned at the doorknob and followed Elroy into the dark living room. It was decorated in early college student, with sheets of batik in reddish brown tenting the ceiling, covering the walls and draped over the two shapeless sofas.

On the right hand sofa, Jonni lay. “Jonni,” I called, making my way around piles of books and mounds of dirty clothes.

“Jonni.”

She lay on her stomach, in her long T-shirt nightgown, and she didn’t move. Her long blond hair covered her face.

“Jonni,” I called. But even before I knelt by her side and put my hand on her cold, cold neck to feel for an nonexistent pulse, I knew that she was dead. The cause wasn’t that far to seek, either. Several empty prescription-labeled bottles lay scattered on the floor near the sofa.

Shocked, gasping, not sure yet what I felt, I yelled out, “She’s dead. Don’t touch anything.” Just as if this were some stupid murder mystery.

Elroy stood by the sofa, staring down at Jonni’s body. “I knew something had gone wrong,” he said.

“Just don’t touch anything,” I told him, feeling tears well up in my eyes, moist, warm tears roll down my face. Damn, what did Jonni want to go and do this for? She was so young, so pretty. And, unlike me, she hadn’t thoroughly fucked up her life, yet. She should have at least tried her hand at fucking it up further, before giving it up. I stumbled to the kitchen, blinded by tears, looking for a phone. I had to call nine-one-one. I had to get the police out here.

“She’s not dead,” Elroy said. “She just needs waking up.”

I didn’t even attempt to argue. No one that cold could be alive.

In the kitchen a narrow cubicle with a stove and a sink piled up with dirty dishes I found a small, white wall-phone and managed to blink away enough of my tears to dial. I’d no more than dialed the nine when I stopped.

From the living room came the sound of Elvis singing “Are you lonesome tonight.” A bright light shone through the kitchen doorway.

Damn, I’d told Elroy not to touch anything. Did he have to go and turn on Jonni’s music, and every damned light? Damn the man.

I slammed the phone down and walked into the living room, to give him what for.

And stopped. He hadn’t turned on any music. Nor the lights.

Elvis, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, stood in the middle of the living room, dressed in a white-sequined polyester jumpsuit, leaning over Jonni and singing, “all my dreams fulfill.” Light shone around and from him.

And Jonni, Jonni who had been cold and dead, sat on the ratty batik sofa and stared up at Elvis, her eyes full of wonder, her cheeks red.

I couldn’t speak. I could take walk-ins. I could take attempted possession. I could take a hundred different things, but Elvis materializing in Jonni’s living room was just too much. To say nothing of this resurrection business.

I leaned against the wall and wondered what had been in that Rice-dream bar.

Elvis took off his scarf and handed it to Jonni.

Jonni, a dazed, enchanted-looking Jonni, clapped enthusiastically.

“Jonni?” I managed to say.

The light went out. I blinked. It wasn’t Elvis. Only Elroy, who stood there, with his hip poked out, his lower lip sticking forward in a rakish pout. “See?” he said, turning around. “I told you she just needed waking.”

I shook my head. Side-effects of working in a New Age store. You eventually went as nuts as the customers.

I approached Jonni gingerly. She had been dead. I was sure she had been dead. “Are you all right?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” she said, in her thin, little-girl voice. “Yeah. I had a bad argument with Pete and I took some sleeping pills and slept late, that’s all. You guys want me to come in to the store?”

“Yes,” Elroy said, unequivocal. “Why don’t you go get dressed?”

“I’ll go with you,” I volunteered, not willing to let her out of my sight, lest she should revert to a dead state. I followed her up a rickety stair and into a messy room, where I watched her change into a pair of jeans and T-shirt. And heard the full account of her row with Pete, told in a strangely detached voice.

“And Elroy woke you?” I asked, bringing her back to the present.

“Yes,” she said, and wrinkled her perfect brow. “Only…I didn’t even know he was an Elvis impersonator.”

Elvis impersonator? So, she’d seen it too? Were hallucinations shared, now?

I led Jonni downstairs and out the door, to the car.

Elroy had cleared a space for her in the back by piling the teddy bears in unholy confusion on one side of the back seat. He sat her down with unusual solicitude, then opened the door for me.

Once I was in and we’d started the drive back to the store, he said, “I hope I never catch you taking sleeping pills again, young one. I don’t want you taking any of that trash. That stuff can kill you.”

I almost told Elroy that we’d all seen the this-is-your-brain-on-drugs commercial, but it struck me that Jonni, whose full name was Jonnitan and whose parents had met in a hippie commune, might never have heard any anti-drug speech from someone she respected. So I let Elroy ramble on in his odd, chewed-up speech.

He sounds just like Elvis, I thought. And his gestures, his hip-positioning, his lower-lip pouting, his disapproving sneer. All of them are just like Elvis. “So, you were an Elvis impersonator, when you were young?” I asked him, when I thought that Jonni had enough sermonizing. Besides, he’d started quoting the gospels mixed up with vintage New Age sayings and stuff about a higher plane.

My question brought him up short. He turned to stare at me. “A what?”

“An Elvis impersonator,” I said, just as the weird thought ran through my mind that there had been no impersonation involved. Looking down, I saw that he wasn’t wearing any belt buckle, certainly not a huge, gold-and-jewels one. Had I dreamed that, too?

I was so shocked that when I paid mind to Elroy again, he had launched off in another sermon of some sort, this one apparently directed at me, “besides, young lady, unlike some people I don’t go through life playing no phony role. It’s just that sometimes you’re required to be what people need, what people think you should be, and in a way to expiate and to cleanse the sins of who you were or they think you were. For instance, all those ice creams you eat”

“I pay for them,” I protested.

“Damn right you do. You can die of overweight, you know. And besides, as my mama used to say”

He had parked in front of the store by the time he finished his sermon. I almost ran out of the car, confused, baffled, feeling like I was having a weird dream and definitely very tired of Elroy’s sermon.

Mark was at the counter, on the phone, with a pile of books in front of him and a pricing gun in his hand. He looked up and mouthed at me, “Jonni?”

“She’s fine. She’s coming in,” I said. I wanted to tell him she’d been dead and Elroy had taken on Elvis’ form and resurrected her, but then Mark would just tell me I’d been working for Eternal Life too long. And maybe I had.

“Well, ma’am, if you are possessed by a malevolent entity, I’d say you definitely should quit your job with the nuclear power plant,” Mark said, into the phone.

I moved in beside him, took the price gun from his hand, determined to start work and forget what must have been a dream, had to have been a dream.

Looking down at the cover on the first book on the pile, I gasped.

Mark covered the mouthpiece on the phone. “Elroy had them vanity published. Isn’t it a hoot?”

I looked at the cover again, speechless.

It showed a figure in a white jumpsuit, surrounded by light. On the top it said Elroy Peters. And on the bottom, in black letters, was the title: Elvis Died For Your Sins.