found some millionaires to be our foster parents and they had arrived to
take us away, but Dad was inside the house, twirling a set of keys on his
finger. He explained that the Cadillac was the new official Walls family
vehicle. Mom was carrying on about how it was one thing to live in a
three-room shack with no electricity, since there was a certain dignity in
poverty, but to live in a three-room shack and own a gold Cadillac meant
you were bona fide poor white trash.
"How'd you get it?" I asked Dad.
"One helluva good poker hand," he said. "and an even better bluff."
We'd owned a couple of cars since we'd been in Welch, but they were
true buckets of bolts, with shuddering engines and cracked windshields,
and as we drove along, we could see the blur of the asphalt through the
rusted-out floor panels. Those cars never lasted more than a couple of
months, and like the Oldsmobile we'd driven from Phoenix, we never
named them, much less got them registered and inspected. The Coupe
DeVille actually had an unexpired inspection sticker. It was such a
beauty that Dad declared the time had come to revive the tradition of
naming our cars. "That there Caddy," he said. "strikes me as Elvis."
It crossed my mind that Dad ought to sell Elvis and use the money to
install an indoor toilet and buy us all new clothes. The black leather
shoes I had bought for fifty cents at the Dollar General Store were held
together with safety pins, which I'd tried to blacken with a Magic Marker
s o you wouldn't notice them. I'd also used Magic Markers to make
colored blotches on my legs that I hoped would camouflage the holes in
my pants. I figured that was less noticeable than if I sewed on patches. I
had one blue pair and one green pair, so my legs, when I took my pants
off, were covered with blue and green spots.
But Dad loved Elvis too dearly to consider selling it. And the truth was, I
loved Elvis almost as much. Elvis was as long and sleek as a racing