Riding Shotgun

Riding Shotgun

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 could see that she thought I’d like to know about like her favorite restaurants and which aunt or cousin lived where.

Elvis Presley used to drive by my grandmother’s house in his green pickup truck with his guitar next to him on the seat, the hip of the guitar nudged up against his own.

One day after seeing him drive by and him waving back to us, I excitedly turned on the cement porch and tripped on the glass milk bottles set out for the next morning’s exchange. One of the rectangular bottles broke as I fell on it, landing on my knees, skewered by the large shards.

I screamed and screamed from the pain and the fear of the blood as my mother rushed me into the bathroom and set me on her knee to mop up around the large lacerations. She pulled one large, angled and glinting piece of glass from under the skin.

She worked hard on stopping the flow, her furrowed brow and determination not enough until she gave in and carried my growing but still pudgy body back out into the DeSoto and onto the long vinyl bench seat, my knees each wrapped in large striped towels with the blood already beginning to spot the stripes.

The DeSoto revved up and Mom backed out of the driveway, spinning dirt before jabbing the Drive button on the dashboard and heading down the street the same way Elvis had gone. My mother’s attempts at soothing my sobs and screams were spoiled by the look on her face as the car hurtled down the single-story street, the beautiful sunset giving her face a fire-angry countenance.

I was not consoled.

Mother glanced desperately around the interior of the car for something to distract me and found my brother’s toy Rifleman Winchester on the back seat. One hand on the wheel and her leg stretched out to keep her foot jammed on the accelerator, she arched backward over the seat and snatched it up.

“Here, shoot any coloreds you see!”, she commanded me. The task of holding my brother’s coveted toy gun while trying to comprehend the order to aim it at a people with whom I did not have any reason to dislike did the trick of distracting me from my terrors for the moment.

And at that moment, there was Elvis, returning down the street in the opposite direction. My mother, in all the urgency of crisis, actually slowed down as she approached the King’s truck.

Elvis slowed down, too. The two vehicles stopped abreast of each other and my mother just smiled, albeit somewhat maniacally. Elvis looked at her, then to me, the rifle on my lap above my wrapped, bloodied knees.

“Ever’thang alright, Ma’am?”

My mother glanced at me dreamily and back to Elvis and slowly nodded, speechless. I protectively raised the rifle to sight down the barrel at Elvis and he brought his right hand to the window sill as a pistol, cocked it, and fired a winking smile at me. I lowered my weapon and smiled back at him.

Elvis put the truck into gear, nodded at my mother and drove on, turning around to follow us out of the neighborhood as I craned my neck to look back over the seat all the way until he turned off to go in another direction.

My mother looked at me, smiled, and jumped on the gas pedal, catapulting us toward the Methodist Hospital emergency room.

Nowadays, when I am riding shotgun with my mother behind the wheel rocketing down the humidity-soaked, one hundred foot high oak-lined boulevards of Memphis, I remember how Elvis came back to make sure I was alright, all because of my mother.