Bardstown is dead and McClellan Jasper is just twenty years old.  He sits in the back of the carriage next to his father, the black leather of the seat sticking to the undersides of his thighs in the hazy Kentucky sun.  He is getting a headache, and across from him all he can see is the shifting weight of the trotting horse’s buttocks and the blond smiling head of Louise bobbing up and down as the carriage circles Court Square.

Louise has just kept on grinning since she arrived from Gatlinburg with her trunks and bags and that brand new diamond ring.  It seems to McClellan that she has brought all of Gatlinburg with her: the narrowness of the Tennessee valley where it is nestled, the slow crawl of traffic pushing towards Dollywood, the horrible glitz of signs.  Mini-golf castles and plastic waterfalls stuck into the sides of its green hills, like the rhinestones in her jean jacket. 

Louise’s hands hadn’t left the back of McClellan’s father’s Wranglers since her arrival, until he finally seated her across from himself and McClellan in the carriage. “So’s we can see your lovely face, my bride,” he said, mustache wriggling in a smile.  Now she has her feet in his lap and her hair is a huge white web obscuring McClellan’s view of the courthouse.  The building’s sharp red spires and white trim are like a lacy piece of Christmas candy making McClellan all sick in this heat.  The Black Velvet Fixx Pomade in his hair is melting into sticky trickles, sliding down into the mess of his sideburns and along the wide curve of his cheeks.  Neither his father nor Louise notice.  His father bellows, looking around him at the Square, “Well, here she is: your new home,” to which she says, “Leon Jasper, it’s just beautiful!”  Antique shops and old brick line the ray of Bardstown’s Main Street like cenotaphs to gentility. 

McClellan lifts his hip to extract a cotton hankie from the back pocket of his shorts.  His glasses have begun to slide, and he takes them off to mop the sides of his nose. As if noticing his reflection for the first time, McClellan holds his glasses up to the sun, looking at his face in the smudgy plastic.  In the curve of the lenses there are two of him, appearing puffier than he really is.  The perfect glazed crest of his hair, its slick wave, is just right—a careful replica of the face tacked to the mirror in his room.  Elvis: looking out at nothing, lips full and babyish, eyes half-asleep and sympathetic to McClellan’s exhaustion. Every morning McClellan is up at five-thirty to allow time to fix his hair.  Now he eyes the sheen of sweat on his face, feels the rivulets of perspiration like little tears down his jaw, and thinks—just for a moment—that they are an asset: the sweat on the King’s body made women crazy. He would shake it off onto them from the stage, and they would beg for more.

McClellan puts his glasses back on.  He does not like them, but he will not get contact lenses.  He is afraid that they will change his eyes, dry them out, make them look different in ten or twenty years.  When he approached middle age, Elvis had eye surgery to try to renew the bedroom gaze they once had when he was younger, but they ended up looking all pouchy and dark, like he hadn’t opened them in years.  McClellan will never mess with his eyes. He loves them.  They are dark and sleepy too, just like his momma’s. That’s what his father said.  “Clel,” he said once, when McClellan was only little. “I can’t ever be sad from missing your momma when I look at you.  She’s in your eyes.”  McClellan hadn’t known what that meant, had been afraid that somehow her ghost had gotten into his head, was looking out and watching everything he saw.  But now he knows. She is a part of him. 

If she could see what McClellan sees now she would be humiliated.  Louise is laughing, hoarse and deep—sensuous, some may say, but McClellan knows it is from smoking cigarettes since she was twelve. Which wasn’t all that long ago.  She is thrusting herself forward in her tank top, showing off the aberration of her bosom, a thing that will never know how to mother. 

Leon Jasper steps out of the carriage in front of the courthouse and offers his hand to Louise, then claps his hand on McClellan’s back.  He chews on the bottom of his mustache nervously to hide his eager smile.  The carriage ride was just the thing.  Louise feels not like a tourist but a belle.  He wraps a tanned, hairy arm around Louise’s tiny waist and the two of them trip up ahead, sauntering toward the Old Stable for lunch.  McClellan falls back, looking at his reflection in the shop window glass.  He flips up his collar to hide his neck from the heat of the slipping sun. 

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