Riding Shotgun

Fiction | Short Story

When Elvis Winked At Me

When we hit the rise just before the railroad tracks, she must’ve been doing about fifty miles an hour in a twenty-five mph zone, somewhere near the Overton Park Zoo in Memphis. We were airborne over the tracks.

Sometime between the time I was three and forty-three, my mother acquired a need for speed.

Now she drove Great Aunt Grace’s late model American car after Aunt Grace fell and broke her hip. The car had less than four thousand miles on it after four years but it was seeing some real action on the streets these days.

Aunt Grace had recently passed at the age of ninety-nine, another in the long line of old-aged southern belles on my mother’s side.

Thank God Mom had both hands on the wheel when we came down with the shocks bottoming out on the other side of the tracks. My hands were white-knuckled around the armrest and holding onto the dash long after she let go of the wheel with her cigarette hand to flail it in the air descriptively as she goes off on another tangent.

Heading over to Walgreen’s off of Stonewall, she was again telling me of how we would always pass Elvis Presley on our street coming home as he was headed out to Graceland while building it.

Aunt Grace used to tease that he later named it after her because of how well she treated him at Union Planters Bank. And she claimed that he would always ask her to lunch but she would refuse, being that she was a professional at the bank and all.

Back then, the big two-tone green Plymouth DeSoto that Mom drove gave me no worries as she drove purposefully down streets lined with brick houses and magnolia trees. The metal visor above the windshield shaded my eyes from the southern sun as Mom sang the tunes she used to tap dance to. Add a gun turret onto that car and it could have been retrofitted as a tank.

I could have ridden outside on the hood like Slim Pickins in Dr. Strangelove, straddling that bomb to earth like a wild mustang. We never got to see him blown to smithereens at the end of his ride, though.

Most of the time I couldn’t see over the dashboard in that car, but Mom would describe to me all that she…

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