"You'd be amazed what people will do to get near this car," says Gadlock. "They'll offer you money and booze, they'll offer to come to your room." That's with a wink. "Hell," he says, "if they want to come to my room, that's fine. But I don't want it to have anything to do with the car." Gadlock, who tells everything under twenty-four and female that they're looking "awful pretty today," is adamant about that. There's a weird ethic going on here with this car. "Hell, now, I wouldn't sleep with Raquel Welch if she wanted it just to sit in the car." It's practically--no, it is--a bona fide matter of honor. A bona fide matter of honor right here in his prefab Ford showroom in the middle of nowhere.

It sounds ridiculous, but all day people have been trying to touch the damn thing. There is something going on here. A lot of people are here and a lot are embarrassed. Some are curious, and some of us are disdainfully amused and aloof. That pose doesn't last long, though. A couple drove up in their pickup truck from Tennessee, six hours away. It's not surprising. It's a Friday night, and there probably isn't a whole hell of a lot going on in Knoxville for the weekend. The couple is in their forties. He's one of those incredibly wiry men and looks like a coal miner, only there's no coal mining in Knoxville, so he's probably a farmer. He's got cinch weed killer in the back of the truck. He's wearing a Chevy hat and chewing tobacco. There's nothing worse in the world than farming sometimes. His wife is all wrapped up in a windbreaker; a modified beehive hairdo. When they come in they seem embarrassed by the pretty, heavily made-up Ford girls, with their insincere cooing over all 124 cubic inches of a new Granada. But eventually they come over to the car anyway. The stand there. Elvis is singing an incredibly overproduced version of "Look Away to Dixieland," and no matter how corny that song may be it will still get to you if you still know how to breathe--it's one of the great cries of noble defeat, like Dylan's "Sarah" or "Wild Horses." One of those songs. Only more. There's something undeniable about the civil war, and the couple just stands there. When the song's over there's a lull before Elvis goes into "Blue Suede Shoes." The man's been dead for years, but the wife smiles. She starts talking about the Rambler he used to come pick her up with when she was his sweetheart. Before they got stuck here. Before the tobacco growing got so ridiculous that it took a quarter of a million in loans just to get a crop in. Before all those bad crops in the early seventies, too. He doesn't say anything. There was a time when Elvis seemed to be saying, as Harry Crews said, that you didn't have to take it in Dipshit, Tennessee, just because you lived in some dumb grit town. For a second you can feel the elation that was Elvis; the man who gave a whole region a little bit of pride. And then it's gone and the whole thing's just too damn sad. All of it--this couple traveling six hours to see a goddamn Lincoln Continental, the Delco car ad display, the shiny Granadas. All those idiots buying t-shirts and pictures of the grave.

The Ford agency is in the middle of nowhere. Like many cities of the "new" south, there's a beltway ringing the town. You have to ride fifteen miles to get here. It's nothing but car dealerships and light industry. There's no reason to be here unless you're here to see the car. You just don't happen by.

The Ford dealership expects to draw twenty thousand people in the four days the car is there. They're trying to push the new small Fords. Things are unwell in Detroit. Elvis is dead, too. Gatlock claims it's a break even situation. He says nothing makes him more mad than hearing people accuse him of making a living off a dead man. "J.D. never would, never will do that. They were friends. There's no respect in that." He mentions the plastic Elvis clones in New York. "Hell," he says. "It still won't be Elvis." He points to the people. "Hell, they'll know for God's sake. They'll know it's not Elvis. You can walk like him, talk like him, sing like him, look like him--it won't be Elvis." What will be missing? Charisma? Memory? Promotion? Mabye grace. Who knows?

The limousine will travel all over the South. It goes to dealerships and fairs and auto shows. Anywhere. Anywhere people want to be reminded that not everyone has to take it wherever. "I just loved him," is what most people say. After a while, you can barely see for the myth. It was so quickly generated. So quickly canonized. When you ask people why they came they are reluctant to talk. It takes a while before it sinks in. They want to be left alone. Here, in the terrible neon on the plush vinyl-smelling carpet, surrounded by sensory input--they want to be left alone. They just want to remember.

I was in Hamilton Bermuda when Elvis, the real Elvis--the one with the improbably cool middle name of Aaron--died. It isn't as glamorous as it sounds. It had been a desperation flight from the country, and, at the time, Bermuda, just six hundred miles off the coast of South Carolina, and with Massachusetts perpetually hanging over its head, was the most exotic place in the world you could fly to from Boston for a hundred bucks. It was late August and the Square was too strident. There are only so many times you can sit through the midnight movies or eat ice cream on Bailey's shaky chairs. There are only so many people reading poetry by the Charles you can stand--especially if you're working in a wheelchair factory. It behooved you to make the hundred bucks. You have a shit job and after a while you feel like shit. One afternoon in Hamilton, someone came by under the palm trees muttering and shaking his head. My friends thought it might be another assassination--it was that kind of muttering. When we found out it was Elvis who died, we didn't much care. In those days we lumped Elvis in with Sinatra and the rest of the "entertainers."

Still, everyone seemed broken up by the whole thing. It didn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense. We thought it was pretty stupid. We though his mourners were even more stupid. We felt like we had some undeniable sense of cool when it came to music. Repairing wheelchairs, we did nothing but listen to "Sticky Fingers" and sneer at the managers. They hated us, but we hated them, too. And we had "Bitch" and "Sway" and Bob Wier and Captain Trips. We thought Elvis was bullshit. We had Mick and Keef. They saved our skins.

One in the morning: Outside the Ford dealership, the guys from Gadlock's crew are getting ready to leave. The dealership has been opened extra late to accomodate crowds. Inside you can hear Elvis doing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" over the Delco system. Another one of those haunted Civil War songs. One by one the flourescent lights go out. There's a weird orange sodium vapor lamp glow over the city ten miles away. The cicadas are going crazy in the heat. It is terribly still and terribly wide open. There's been a bag lady outside the window all night, and everyone's been making fun of her. God knows how she got out here on the beltway. It's too elaborate, probably. As you're leaving she wants to talk to you, and almost everyone talks loudly and ignores her. If you stop she tells you she wants to enlist you in her plan to resurrect Elvis.

"They've hidden the body in the trunk," she says. "You know, we could get it out. You and me." Probably, Sure. "They don't want anyone to know," she says. "They're hiding him from us." Say nothing, Walk away. Gun down the expressway and leave this, another scene of southern gothic, behind.

In the trunk? Christ, Probably. The question is: Who the hell knows if he would want to come back?