Elvis, Change Your Name (the story)

All the dead rock stars have been buried in weird, glittering ceremonies and are living under the Witness Protection Program in the badlands of America.

By now, they are almost outlaws. getting old and bitter, and the ache in their bones when they remember yesterday is making them crazy for the rhythms that still twitch in their fingers, and their throats are hungry to sing the songs again, with all the tension and heat of being cool.

He worked out hard so he wouldn’t get fat any more but anyway the plastic surgery had killed the old identity, and the secret agent in the blue suit and red tie had hollered, “No gigs! No gigs!” over his departing shoulder. So now there is nothing left but electronic dreams and the perfumed heat and silken curves lying on the water-bed, even if there would always be plenty of money until they decide to turn him off.

Some time in the middle of the night, he began to wander in the big country, where the deep space sky knows all about you but can’t possibly care, and sheer movement might increase your chances in the long run. And a white horse appeared on the low moon horizon with sad eyes and everything, and they galloped headlong through the decaying purple darkness until an opalescent dawn revealed a town where tumbleweed was rolling along Main Street and an empty chair in front of the saloon was rocking.

Walking through the drifting dust and swinging doors toward the smell of coffee, he noticed that Hendrix was a two-gun man. They were all there. They had been waiting for him.
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“Hey, Dawson! Think fast!”

There was a rock in the snowball and it hit the kid squarely on the back of his neck, ice-cold and stinging. There was blood in the snow that was melting down his back and staining his new white shirt. He turned around slowly and the black fury in his dark eyes jolted the excited group of youngsters so much that they backed off quickly, moving away up the street and covering their retreat with a display of false bravado, hooting and laughing and congratulating each other. They had seen the bright red trickle in his long black hair.

Jack Dawson didn’t go chasing after them because he was older than them and a lot bigger and he’d been hungry all day at school and now if he went home to his mother’s good cooking he was going to catch hell from his father for the ruined shirt. That was the rule – whenever he had a problem it was automatically his own fault. He was the oldest, wasn’t he?

His mother’s weak, watery eyes always loved him, but she was worn out with taking care of the three younger children and if she ever did happen to have a scrap of energy left over for Jack, his father could always invent some emergency that she just had to deal with right away. Jack often wondered what his mother used to be like. In his earliest memories, she was pale and pretty, sweet and sad and pregnant.

He gingerly touched the wound at the base of his skull. His large hand came away covered with blood. Cursing loudly, he picked up a handful of clean-looking snow and pressed it against the cut. The sharp pain made him feel a lurching in his stomach.

He leaned his shoulder against a graffitti-covered wall, closed his eyes and clenched his teeth. He let the scarlet flashing lights inside his head go all the way from red to purple to blue and fade to black.
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Elvis and Jimi and Ronnie Van Zandt were riding single file through the stirrup-high sagebrush. The high desert sun beat down on them like a hammer on an anvil. It was much too hot to talk and the bandannas over their noses and mouths didn’t nearly keep all of the dust out of their parched throats.

But the three men had no need to talk. Somewhere somebody always needed their help. Jimi and Ronnie watched Elvis for the first tell-tale signs that he had picked up a scent on the trail of evil they had been following for three days now. If there was trouble around anywhere he’d sure find it. Not that Elvis had a suspicious mind, you understand. It frequently happened that he was almost maddeningly scrupulous about giving the bad guy the benefit of the doubt. Lennon had been rather snide on the subject once or twice.

But anyhow, when Elvis did know for sure everybody was effectively reminded that there was still such a thing as righteous anger in this weary old world. He had always been an excellent shot, fast and accurate and absolutely fearless. Elvis was the best.
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Jack opened one of his eyes, sniffed and opened both of them and took a long, shuddering breath of the stinking city air. The pavement beneath his feet was both slimy and crunchy.

He made himself stand up straight and took a few unsteady steps backwards up the alley. He attempted to clean his bloody hand on some old snow that was piled up against the foundation of a derelict building there. He also tried to see his reflection in a broken window-pane to assess the damage to his new shirt, but of course he couldn’t, so he shrugged his shoulders in his loose-fitting jacket and lifted one corner of his upper lip in a well-practised sneer. Why should he care?

He decided to smoke one of the cigarettes he had left and dug the crumpled package out of his ragged back-pack, out from under all the damn books. He wished for the umpteenth time that he had a walkman but he didn’t, so he started to sing “Heartbreak Hotel”, softly at first but then louder and louder until his adolescent voice broke and he failed to reach a high note that always used to be easy for him.

He shut up and lit the cigarette and smoked it down to nothing and stepped on that. He forgot about the injury to his neck as soon as it stopped hurting. He had other concerns. He started to walk toward the park, his long skinny legs taking him swiftly through the darkening streets.

Jack had a pretty good idea why his father couldn’t stand him. It was because he thought Jack was somebody else’s kid. His mother had never breathed a word to him about it but he had listened to the endless, bitter argument all his life through the thin bedroom walls. On these sordid occasions, his father was either drunk or didn’t care or both. But even very small children have ‘big ears’ and they can understand long before they can talk back.

To everybody at school, Jack was always “Dawson” because he actually bore a strong resemblance to the old man and he only had to look in the mirror to see the obvious, depressing truth. His father was being wilfully blind to it, most likely to punish his mother for some old hurt, some poisoning, secret shame. In the shadows of Jack’s mind, his mother was always crying, but crying silently so that his father could pretend he didn’t know.
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Elvis dismounted and stroked the nose of his sturdy old white horse. The other two could hear the low music of his marvelous voice as he praised the animal, murmuring into its ear. They were standing in a cool grove of cottonwoods, big spreading trees growing out of the chunky black boulders accumulated along the base of these mountains. It was the first cover they had seen for days, ever since they left town.

Elvis led the horse to a miniscule creek that gurgled between the trees a few yards away, where the animal lowered its head and drank. He knelt down on one knee beside the horse, the reins held loosely in one hand. He pulled down his bandanna, revealing a face that was the colour of bronze from long exposure to sun and wind, and leaned forward to drink directly from the cleft between the mossy rocks. Then he filled his hat to the brim and put it back on his head, licking at the water that ran down around his lips and then sucking meditatively at his long black moustaches.

His companions could tell that he was already working on the latest plan – his dark eyes were amused, crinkling slightly at the corners. Just over the other side of this ridge, there was the abandoned shell of an old cabin where they figured that their quarry was maybe holed up. The tracks had told the story of two exhausted cayuses, one badly lame. The sooner they took action, the better the chances that his young victim would still be alive… and sane.

The water trickling down his chest and back felt deliciously cool and refreshing but wouldn’t last long in the super-dry air. Elvis wished that they could stop here for a smoke but he just couldn’t allow it, not yet. There were two pairs of eyes standing there telling him that they were ready. But then, they were always ready.

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Now Jack was really in a bad mood and a freezing wind was starting to whine and wail among the desolate buildings, scouring the winter streets and nipping at his lean body. The low blood-sugar and incessant growing-pains in his legs lately conspired to bring back the crushing blackness that was hovering in the foul air overhead. In spite of the interruption of his day-dream earlier, he tried to sing as he walked through the lengthening shadows, hoping to dispel some of the gloom that way. But the headache behind his eyes just got worse, so he fingered a pill out of the pocket of his old jean-jacket and swallowed it, feeling its dry shape going all the way down the inside of his skinny neck.

His main hobby in life lately was riding herd on some school-yard bullies, a loosely organized collection of big bodies with small brains, who hardly constituted a challenge for him any more. He had suffered for years himself from beatings and theft – at school and on the way to and from school – as an underfed youngster with low self-esteem and all that guff. He had mostly burned off that childhood grudge when he pounded the bullshit out of Benny Murdock that time. But it hadn’t stopped there, had it? And now, he cursed to himself, he still felt responsible for each and every snot-nosed baby the teachers shoved into the cage at recess.

Jack was in high school now and therefore he could only stand outside the wire fence and watch it happening. He had no friends of his own age to help him either because he could never forget the indifferent stares of those particular individuals when they were all little kids and he had been unanimously elected as collective whipping-boy.

He could not believe how some of those guys actually tried to suck up to him now – now, that is, that he was getting to be one of the tallest dudes in school and he had that nice long reach to his arms and hands, now that he also had the facial scars to display as badges of toughness to go along with those cynical eyes of his, those doberman eyes that seemed to tell you he knew you better than you knew yourself. Oh yeah, they’d better avoid him, all right, even though the scars were already beginning to fade. It had been a while since anybody had been able to lay a hand on him. So now they threw rocks. Primitive progress. But screw them anyway.

So today there was this undersized kid who had recently moved into the neighbourhood and was due for a thorough pounding, the obligatory ‘breaking in’. And the big dummies were always so pathetically predictable, he thought. Jack had timed his arrival at their favourite little hidey-hole for maximum shock-effect. Moving with blinding speed, he lifted their limp, terrified victim out of their dirty paws and set him down out of the way. The little kid hit the ground running.

Then Jack’s eyes sort of glazed over and a deep, spreading joy flooded his nervous system and energized his muscles. He decked all three of the guys in a row – Pow! Pow! Pow! – and then he just totally lost it and his whole world became stark and purple-coloured, with an eerie red glow high-lighting the edges of everything. Yes, he could hear the thudding of his fists and he could clearly feel somebody hitting him with a big stick or something on his back and legs too. But none of that made any difference to the final outcome, and they must have been more or less okay because they sure did run fast.

Then Jack just stood there with his upper lip twitching and his sore hands pushed deep down in his pockets, thinking that at least the damn books in his back-pack had come in handy for once, if only as crude armour. It was starting to get dark by then, with a dirty gray sky and deep purple shadows sneaking around behind the buildings, and the snow was coming down again but the snowflakes looked depressingly yellow under the street-lights. Jack was cold and he was hungry and he was so alone.

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The girl ran full tilt into JImi, who was just trying to sneak up the side-hill to ambush Big Bull Cavendish – who was presumably her recent abductor. She was running blindly downhill, looking backwards over her shoulder in silent, open-mouthed terror. Jimi firmly covered her mouth with his free hand – the other one held a cocked pistol. So she didn’t have a chance to scream, which it was a good thing as it turned out, and one of his powerful arms was more than enough to quell her panicked, squirming struggle. Her bruised eyes, the pupils dilated with fear, failed to focus on him at first, but he was able to soothe her with his warm voice and the low, quiet words, “Suzy, Suzy… now hush. We’re your friends, child. Be still, will ya please?”

Her frantic eyes came together on his good-humoured face and she nodded yes.
“Tell us where Bull’s at, okay? We come here to take him out, girl.”
“I don’t know. I threw sand in his eyes out back of the cabin just now… and he’s gonna be mad as hell…”
Hendrix noted that her speech was made difficult by a cut mouth and swollen lips. And then there was a mindless squealing starting to come out of her throat and her whole body was wriggling against the restraining strength of his arm. Dismayed, He aimed a questioning glance at Elvis, who was hunched over nearby, closely observing the exchange. Elvis gave Jimi a wry grin and motioned him to escort the reluctant rescuee back down the side-hill to the relative safety of the cottonwoods. Jimi growled briefly to express his feelings on the subject, but he couldn’t come up with any good alternative to his friend’s suggestion, so he moved quickly and effectively, holstering his weapon and picking the girl up bodily.

She was awfully small and lightweight and there were already plenty of cuts and bruises on her bare feet and legs. The dirty rags that were remaining of her original clothing didn’t give her a whole lot of protection either and Jimi could sense that she was about to go into shock on him. He didn’t waste any time carrying her back down to the leafy shade of the sheltered place where the horses were tethered, to the pleasant tinkling of the tiny stream, and set her down next to a big old dead log there.

Jimi made a quick trip to his saddle-bags and got out some of Morrison’s venison jerky and one of Janis’s heavy woven ponchos. Without a word, he put the things on her lap, along with one of his own loaded pistols. He put a finger to his lips to remind her to be quiet and she nodded weakly.

Cursing the lost time but pleased to have secured the victim before the battle, Hendrix jumped up onto the back of his buckskin horse, took up his Winchester in one hand, and rode quickly and cautiously back up the side-hill again, grimly determined to be in on the action and filled with anxiety for his friends. He anticipated that things were about to cut loose big-time when they finally caught up with Big Bull Cavendsh. He was a huge man, mean and cunning as any predatory carnivore you could name, and he had caused a heap of innocent pain and suffering in his lifetime. Jimi could only take a rough guess that by dedicating his life to the destruction of human goodness he expected to somehow diminish the contrast with his disgusting self.

Jimi shook his grizzled head and gave up trying to understand evil for the moment. Fervently, he hoped that this confrontation would take place out in the open. He disliked sieges intensely.

Just short of cresting the ridge, he dismounted and tied the buckskin to a small pine. He stayed low and snuck up on the ramshackle building, moving silently from tree to tree in the stretched-out shadows of the dying day. He could see and hear nobody and nothing.
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By the time Jack got home, there weren’t too many leftovers left on the table, but his mother quietly handed him a filled plate she’d been keeping warm in the oven.

The rest of the family were assembled in front of the T.V. set in the living-room and the mood seemed to be fairly pleasant. The old man’s gut was full and he was briefly benevolent but it wouldn’t last. The kids were boisterous with nervous energy and one of them was bound to get between his father and the T.V. sooner or later.

Jack hastily swallowed his food standing up and walked casually into the living-room. He could feel the tension building but he was more or less used to it and he had noticed lately that the incidence of domestic violence was markedly reduced when he was in the room.

Little Tammy was playing with her dollies on the worn carpet and when Jack sat down in the armchair – almost aching for its comfort – young Jamie, his kid brother, came over shyly and sat beside him on the arm of the chair. They were watching a situation comedy but nobody was laughing. At least his mother would have the kitchen to herself while she did the dishes, he thought. Then Marilyn, who was almost thirteen, got up off the couch and joined her mother out there.

So the inevitable moment came when Jack was just starting to relax and feel the warmth of the room and the old man jerked upright on the couch and hunched forward with his elbows on his knees, pointed his stubbly chin at his son and barked, “Jack! How come you still got your coat on, huh? You trying to let on that the house is cold, kid? Is my house too cold for you maybe?”

And then he started laughing that quiet what’s-the-use snickering laugh of his. The T.V.’s laughing up a storm too, but nobody’s even pretending to watch it now.

Jack responded civilly, “No, I’m not cold.” And he stood up, taking off the jacket while he was walking through the hall to the kitchen, where Marilyn was sadly doing the dishes. His mother was sitting in that little corner of hers at the table, with her back to the solid bulk of the refrigerator and a cup of coffee and a half-full ashtray in front of her, smoking a cigarette. Jack tried to make a fast exit, mumbling, “Mom, I’m beat, okay? I’m just going on up to bed.”

But the damned overhead light had already shown her the colour of blood on the back of his shirt, and she was all authority when she said, “Jack, get over here right now!”

With a shrugging motion, he slid his arms inside the sleeves of his jean-jacket again, lowered his head and pushed his hands into his pockets before shouldering the door open. Then he went back outside, back out onto the dark and frozen streets. He knew his mother would be too scared of annoying his father to call out or try to come after him.

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Hendrix cautiously eased himself around the crudely axe-hewn corner of the old cabin and instantly felt like a one-man audience in an outdoor amphithetater. And it was going to be a real virtuoso performance too, because Elvis was giving Big Bull Cavendish an even break on the rocky flat at the bottom of the long, gravelly slope that backed the cabin.

In that brief moment of helpless observation, he saw Ronnie Van Zandt, whose right hand gripped the hilt of his big throwing-knife, coming at a run out of a jumble of boulders and sagebrush at the edge of the clearing down there. At the same time, Elvis made a restraining gesture, his left hand held low and and his open palm motioning Ronnie to stay back, his fierce eyes never leaving those of the dirty, hairy giant who stood stupidly at bay twenty yards away. Elvis knew when to keep his mouth shut, but Bull’s growling voice was cussing a blue streak into the savagely pure mountain air.

Jimi cocked his rifle and stood up straight on the edge of the side-hill above them, sure that Elvis would hear the significant double click and hoping that Bull would duly note the extra insurance policy now in position. Maybe, just maybe, he would back down after all. Ronnie had brought along his rope, just in case.

The sun was down behind the mountains now, dropping like a hot rock, and the whole sky was lit up red. The stunning clarity of the super-dry desert air, in combination with all the heat-waves that were still rippling off the exposed rock-faces, made Jimi’s view of the scene below him seem altogether surreal. Time was an elastic band that first stretched to the limit and then snapped. The event itself was compressed into a split second, complex and intense as thunder and lightning.

Bull’s blunted face went from sullen to brutal and his big ugly arm jerked forward to the gun that was in the low-slung, battered holster aound his hips. He continued to whine and growl like an enraged bear or something… but Elvis simply drew his own six-shooter with that casual and invisible speed of his and shot Bull Cavendish once between the eyes.

The echoes of the single shot crackled and bounced away into the distance, but it was the dull thud of the big loser’s dead weight hitting the ground, followed of course by the overwhelming silence of the place – that maddeningly disinterested peace that came flooding back – that got Jimi breathing again. He took three or four deep whoops of air into his lungs and then expressed his feelings in a free-form rock’n’roll dance.

Elvis’s voice, low and calm, drawled, “So who forgot to bring a shovel this time?”

They buried the big bastard where he fell. It was hard work in that rocky, hard-packed dirt and they were all grateful for the cooling effect of the night air that came pouring down the mountainsides. Nobody said another word until they were done and by that time white moonlight was starting to elongate the shadows of the ponderosa pines and clumps of sagebrush that decorated the angular landscape.

They found a couple of scrawny horses in the makeshift corral and let them out to follow along or not. The girl was still where Jimi had left her, one forefinger curled laxly around the trigger of the pistol. She didn’t even wake up when Elvis took the gun away and lifted her small self and placed her in Jimi’s arms for the long ride back to town. They all smiled at that, but then Elvis started to look grim.

He figured that there’d probably be more bad news waiting for them when tey got back. Everything just seemed to be getting worse and worse lately. Ronnie had searched the old cabin and come up with several amateurish polaroids of little Suzy, tied up with tape over her mouth, and that could only mean one thing – which tended to confirm an old, depressing hunch of his. That slime-ball son-of-a-bitch had been planning to sell that little girl. To his mind, this was the last straw – Lincoln freed the slaves once and for all, right? This was the signal for a general mobilization of the ex-rock-stars, who had been more or less content up to now with small victories and just staying alive…

Anyway, little Suzy would be safe and secure for the time being, he comforted himself, letting his eyes rest on her peaceful sleeping face riding along in Jimi’s strong arms. They would travel all night, making a bee-line for town, and then Janis would put the girl up at the hotel until she was well and strong again, if ever.

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Jack almost enjoyed making tracks in the fluffy, new-fallen snow covering the sidewalk, turning right around once or twice to look at the wandering trail he had made since coming out of the dilapidated bulgalow that squatted indistinguishably among all the other dwellings on the slummy, familiar street.

He hardly felt any sentimental attachment to the place. That was because he had never been allowed to think of it as his own home. He had always been a temporary resident. And now, he supposed, he was becoming a permanent pilgrim, huh?

His raw-boned adolescent body shivered inside his inadequate jacket and he hunched up his shoulders and bowed his head before the snow-storm, trying to force his restless mind into thoughtlessness and his two long legs into simply putting one foot in front of the other. He liked the crystalline sparkle of the snowflakes as his boots pushed them aside and crushed them.

He decided that he didn’t believe what he had been told about the so-called scientific fact of the uniqueness of each snowflake, examining a dozen or so of them critically before they melted away on his upturned palm. Hey now – honestly, he thought, who could possibly have researched and proven a thing like that? Try to imagine some geeky guy in a white lab-coat going all over the wintry world with a magnifying glass and then finally calling a press-conference as a very old man to declare, “Nope. Not two snowflakes alike, never and nowhere.” And then the entire population of the planet nodding together in enlightened agreement, wide-eyed in wonder at the amazing wisdom of it all, can’t wait to tell their grandchildren about it. Because if so many people believe something it has to be true, right? Right?

Up ahead, there was a bunch of little kids playing under a street-lamp, trying to make a snowman but without much success because this snow wasn’t the right kind, not nearly sticky enough. But they were having plenty of noisy fun anyway. And then they saw Jack coming up the street and ran around behind their house, scared of him.

So he got depressed again after that, realizing how terribly bone-tired he was and wishing for some kind of quiet place with just a bed and a table and a chair and a bottle of pop and a bag of cookies maybe, anywhere he could hole up for a while and get a break and think…

Jack envisioned himself walking forever around the globe like the guy checking out snowflakes and all the roads and highways criss-crossing each other and no place for him to belong. He pictured the way the night side of the planet must look from outer space, all the gazillions of electric lights winking off and on and the headlights and tail-lights swishing around the darkene continents.

The streets down here were actually pretty quiet this early in the evening, almost empty because everybody seemed to be home already, safe and cozy in living-rooms full of gray-blue television glow. He could faintly hear the simultaneous laughter of the surrounding neighbourhood. It was prime time in there.

Then he heard a car coming up behind him on his left, its engine purring powerfully and tires crunching slowly along the road. He ignored it as he was sure it would ignore him. He heard the gunshot that ended his life but he didn’t feel it.

Tires squealed on the icy pavement like the triumphant scream of a hunting wildcat and the fresh snow was spattered with his bright young blood.

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Jack woke up the next morning in a sunny upstairs room, lying flat on his back in a big four-poster bed. There was a small head on his shoulder, her long, silky brown hair spread across his naked chest, and his hand caressed the warm curve of a supple feminine waist. He was deliciously sleepy and he couldn’t recall exactly why but he felt so happy, full of excited anticipation for the new day. Between fluttering white lace curtains, the wide open windows showed him that the sky was infinitely blue and cloudless and the breezy air was hot without a trace of humidity.

Gently disentangling his arm from the slumbering girl, he got out of bed and dressed himself in the gray pin-stripe pants and powder-blue western shirt that he found draped over a chair beside the bed, clothes which he didn’t really recognize but liked very much indeed. The snakeskin boots on the floor were almost elegant and they fit perfectly. Everything here fit so perfectly and all his surroundings began to feel much more familiar. Wonderingly, Jack walked over to the windows and looked down into the street below.

Standing there, he was surprised at first by the amount of activity he saw. All along the wide Main Street, the townspeople were talking to each other in excited, questioning tones and they were moving toward a big corral that was visible in the near distance. Some were on foot and some were on horseback, raising clouds of billowing dust through which filtered the slanting rays of the morning sun.

Jack’s mind was starting to clear now, throwing off the vaguely disconcerting sense of deja-vu that had been sort of haunting him ever since he woke up. Certain images were resolving themselves like the shadows of old friends approaching through darkness…

In a flash, he knew that the name of the girl in the bed was Suzy. He turned his head and rested his eyes on her sweetly sleeping form under the soft white bedclothes. How she did love that bed! He smiled. He felt relaxed and strong and any lingering traces of nervousness just melted away in the wonderful desert air. It was so good to be alive here. The simple awareness of being young in the morning was way better than any kind of drug-induced high had ever been. This was great!

Eager for some kind of action, he remembered seeing a gun-belt hanging on the back of one of the chairs and hurried over to strap it around his waist. He spun the chamber of the six-shooter and tested its grip, finding it to be perfect and delightful in his hand. Then he recognized his old cowboy hat on the dresser and slammed it onto his head, grinning happily at his reflection in the large oval mirror.

He couldn’t resist drawing his gun a few times and man, was he fast! In his exuberance, he yelled, “Yee-Haw!” Then he glanced guiltily back at the girl in the bed. Cool. She was still asleep, with a gentle smile on her pretty face. He fondly blew her a kiss, carefully turned the fancy brass doorknob, opened the door, and stepped out onto the landing.

Impatiently, he ran down the wide staircase of the hotel, out through the front door and to the boardwalk and the wide, dusty street. Of course his faithful mustang was standing there at the hitching-rail waiting for him and whinnied its friendly greeting as usual. So he gladly leaped into the saddle, picked up the reins, and started to ride toward the large corral, where a sizeable crowd was gathering. A number of people were sitting on top of the fence-rails, watching the horses being lassoed and saddled up, and the rising dust-clouds were sparkling like gold in the light of the sun, which was climbing higher and higher in the empty blue dome of the sky.

A few minutes later, Jack had ridden up close enough to see most of the faces and he knew them well, had known them most of his life. Many of them wore serious expressions, frowning as they listened attentively to a dark-haired hombre with long black mustaches who sat easily on a tall white horse.

Jack knew that voice too – it was unmistakable. It could only be one person, after all. That man raised his arm and sang out, “Let’s ride!” and everybody mounted up and joined the posse. They all trotted away up the road and the dust started to settle. Jack was so totally awe-struck at first that he didn’t know how to react. His open mouth offered easy entry to the dust floating in the air.

But then his eyes opened wide and he shut his mouth and swallowed hard. As loud as he could, he called out, “Hey, Elvis! Wait for me!” And he kicked his horse into a full, pounding gallop.

At the head of the long column, Elvis turned to Jimi with a lop-sided smile and drawled, “Well, he’s a good kid and he sure does love a fight!”

THE END

  • msiz

    msiz

    Hi,
    I haven’t finished reading this story, but so far I really like it. I read quite a bit. This is a wonderful addition to the fantasy genre. Have you thought about expanding it into a novel?

  • nancyames replied

    Thanks, msiz, and yes, of course this story has the potential for expansion but I do like the compact version, which I wrote about twenty years ago. I’m working on a few novels too, and you could check out “Fantasy With Dragons”, “Plus or MInus a Few”, “Hostile Eyes”. I have only put the first chapters on redbubble, for convenience.

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