He washed until all the mud was gone, including the goo under his fingernails, unmindful of the spreading numbness. He even held his shirt-cuffs under the spigot.
He turned off the faucet, went back to his bike, put up the kickstand, and walked it back down the driveway. He had a very bad moment when he saw a small yellow compact car coming, but it was a Civic, not a Yugo. It went past without slowing, its driver unmindful of the little boy with the red, chapped hands frozen beside his bike in the jerzyck driveway, the little boy whose face was nearly a billboard with one word-GUILTY!-screaming across it.
When the car was gone, Brian mounted his bike and began to I pedal, hellbent for leather. He didn't stop until he was coasting up his own driveway. The numbness was leaving his hands by then, but they itched and smarted... and they were still red.
When he went in, his mother called, "That you, Brian?" from the living room.
"Yes, Ma." What he had done in the jerzyck back yard already seemed like something he might have dreamed. Surely the boy standing here in this sunny, sane kitchen, the boy who was now going to the refrigerator and taking out the milk, could not be the same boy who had plunged his hands up to the wrists in the mud of Wilma jerzyck's garden and then flung that mud at Wilma Jerzyck's clean sheets again and again and again.
Surely not.
He poured himself a glass of milk, studying his hands as he did.
They were clean. Red, but clean. He put the milk back. His heart had returned to its normal rhythm.
"Did you have a good day at school, Brian?" Cora's voice floated out.
"It was okay."
"Want to come in and watch TV with me? Santa Barbara will be on pretty soon, and there's Hershey's Icsses."
"Sure," he said, "but I'm going upstairs for a few minutes first."
"Don't you leave a milk-glass up there! It goes all sour and stinks and it never comes off in the dishwasher!"
"I'll bring it down, Ma."
"You better!"
Brian went upstairs and spent half an hour sitting at his desk, dreaming over his Sandy Koufax card. When Sean came in to ask if he wanted to go down to the corner store with him, Brian shut his baseball-card book with a snap and told Sean to get out of his room and not to come back until he learned how to knock on a door when it was shut. He heard Sean standing out in the hallway, crying, and felt no sympathy at all.
There was, after all, such a thing as manners.
Warden threw a party in the county jail, Prison band was there and they began to wail, The band was J'Umpin and the joint began to swing, Y'oughtta heard those knocked-out jailhirds sing!
The King stands wi'th his legs apart, his blue eyes blazing, the bell bottoms of his white JUmpsuit shaking. Rhinestones glitter andflash in the overhead spotlights. A sheaf of blue-black hair falls across his forehead. The mike is near his mouth, but not so near Myra cannot see the pouty curl of his upper lip.
She can see everything. She is i'n the first row.
And suddenly, as the rhythm section blasts off, he is holding a hand out, holding it out to HER, the way Bruce Springsteen (who will never be The King in a million years, no matter how hard he tries) holds his hand out to that girl i'n his "Dancing in the Dark" video.
For a moment she's too stunned to do anything, too stunned to move, and then hands from behind push her forward, and HIs hand has closed over her wrist, HIs hand is pulling her up on stage. She can SMELL him, a mixture of sweat, English Leather, and hot, clean flesh.
A bare moment later, Myra Evans is in Elvis Presley's arms.
The satin of his jumpsuit is slick under her hands. The arms around her are muscular. That face, HIS face, the face of The King, is inches from hers. He is dancing with her-they are a couple, Myra Josephine Evans from Castle Rock, Malone, and Elvis Aron Presley, from Memphis, Tennessee! They dirty-dance their way across a wide stage in front of four thousand screaming fans as the jordanaires chant that funky old fifties refrain: "Let's rock... everybody let's rock...
"His hips move in against hers; she can feel the coiled tension at the center of him nudging against her belly. Then he twirls her, her