Nashville Chrome

by Rick Bass

  Nashville Chrome

  Rick Bass

  * * *

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

  Boston | New York

  2010

  * * *

  Copyright © 2010 by Rick Bass

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections

  from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bass, Rick, date.

  Nashville chrome / Rick Bass.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-547-31726-7

  1. Country musicians—Fiction. 2. Country music—Tennessee—

  Nashville—Fiction. 3. Nashville (Tenn.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.A8213N37 2010

  813'.54—dc22 2010005732

  Book design by Patrick Barry

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  * * *

  FOR NICOLE AND BOB

  * * *

  They said that it was no accident of circumstance that a man

  be born in a certain country and not some other and they

  said that the weathers and seasons that form a land form also

  the inner fortunes of men in their generations and are passed

  on to their children and are not so easily come by otherwise.

  —CORMAC McCARTHY,

  All the Pretty Horses

  * * *

  Prologue

  For a little while, the children—Maxine, Jim Ed, Bonnie—were too young to know the weight of their gift, or even that their lives were hard. Their parents had always been poor, but never before had there been such desperation. Never before had there been a time when one's talents—whether hunter or farmer, salesman or tailor—had been insufficient to keep food in the mouths of their family. Now the country was saying the Depression had ended, but where they lived, in south-central Arkansas, not so far from Mississippi—back in the swamps, between the rolling ridges that looked down on Poplar Creek—nothing was different. Things had been bad before the Depression, then got much worse during it, and people were not yet recovering, even though what little news they heard back in the hills told them that everything was better now.

  The children's parents, Floyd and Birdie, were still starving, still ravenous—still wondering why they had been put on earth, why they had been brought into the world.

  But for a while, the children didn't know this despair. They would have breathed it like the fog vapors that rose some nights from the swamp, would have absorbed it night and day, until it became so wreathed within them that soon enough it would have begun to replace the spirits with which they had come into the world: but not yet, not then. Floyd was drinking hard and logging harder, felling the oaks and hickories with axes and crosscut saws and sledging them out of the swamp with mules and, when the mules were injured, with men too poor sometimes to afford even a cup of fuel for their bulldozers and tractors—and so their gnawings at the old forest seemed as infinitesimal as they were ceaseless. It seemed that the old forest might grow back in just as fast as the men could sledge the logs out.

  The places where they worked opened the forest briefly to the sky, let in little patches of white light in which ferns and orchids grew, blossomed, and prospered briefly before the young canopy closed back in over such clearings.

  The children, before they knew their calling, sat at the edge of the creek next to one such clearing and watched the slow muddy waters of Poplar Creek drift past. The nearest town, Sparkman, was eight miles away. To them the world was still beautiful, and only beautiful. They sat there quietly, in the last free days before they became aware that they had a gift—not a gift they had asked for or labored toward, but which had been impressed on them from birth—and they waited, one must assume, for the wisps of despair and misery to begin to soak into their skin like the smoke from the burning of the slash piles, blue smoke hanging in sunlit rafts all throughout the forest, as if a great war were being fought, one about which they knew nothing, one of which they were entirely unaware.

  THE FIRE

  HER FIRST MEMORY is of heroism and stardom, of great accomplishment and acclaim, even in the midst of ruin.

  She was five years old, firmly in the nest of her family, at her aunt and uncle's cabin. The adults were in the front room, sitting in front of the drafty fireplace. Maxine was sleeping in the back room on a shuck mattress, Jim Ed was on a pallet, and Bonnie was in her cradle. Maxine awoke to the sight of orange and gold flickerings the shapes and sizes of the stars, and beyond those, real stars.

  The view grew wider.

  Stirred by the breezes of their own making, the sparks turned to flames, and burning segments of cedar-shake roofing began to curl and float upward like burning sheets of paper.

  She lay there, waiting, watching.

  It was not until the first sparks landed on her bed that she broke from her reverie and leapt up and lifted Bonnie from her cradle and Jim Ed from his pallet, a baby in each arm, and ran into the next room, a cinder smoking in her wild black hair, charging out into the lanternlight of the front room as if onto a stage, calling out the one word, Fire, with each of the adults paying full and utmost attention to her, each face limned with respect, waiting to hear more.

  They all ran outside, women and children first, into the snowy woods, grabbing quilts as they left, while the men tried to battle the blaze, but to no avail; the cabin was on fire from the top down, had been burning for some time already while they played, and now was collapsing down upon them, timbers crackling and crumbling. In the end all the men were able to save was the Bible, their guns, and their guitars, fiddles, banjos, mandolins, and dulcimers.

  There are a thousand different turns along the path where anyone could look back and say, If things had not gone right here, if things had not turned out this certain way—if Maxine had not done this, if Jim Ed and Bonnie had not done that—none of all that came afterward would ever have happened.

  Only once, looking back, it would seem that from the very beginning there had been only one possible path, with the destination and outcome—the bondage of fame—as predetermined as were the branches in the path infinite.

  That the greatest voices, the greatest harmony in country music, should come from such a hardscrabble swamp—Poplar Creek, Arkansas—and that fame should lavish itself upon the three of them, their voices braiding together to give the country the precise thing it most needed or desired—silky polish, after so much raggedness, and a sound that would be referred to as Nashville Chrome—makes an observer pause. Did their fabulous voices come from their own hungers within, or from thrice-in-a-lifetime coincidence? They were in the right place at the right time, and the wrong place at the right time.

  There was never a day in their childhood when they did not know fire. They burned wood in their stove year round, not just to stay warm in winter but to cook with and to bathe. In the autumn the red and yellow and orange leaves fell onto the slow brown waters of the creek, where they floated and gathered in such numbers that it seemed the creek itself was burning. And as the men gnawed at the forest and piled the limbs and branches from the crooked trunks, they continued to burn the slash in great pyres. The smoke gave the children a husky, deeper voice right from the start. Everyone in the little backwoods villages sang and played music, but the children's voices were different, bewitching, especially when they sang harmony. No one could quite put a finger on it, but all were drawn to it. It was beguiling, soothing. It healed some wound deep within whoever heard it, whatever the wound.

&nbs
p; The singers themselves, however, received no such rehabilitation. For Jim Ed and Bonnie, the sound passed through without seeming to touch them at all, neither injuring nor healing. They could take it or leave it; it was a lark, a party trick, a phenomenon.

  Where had it come from, and when they are gone, where will it go?

  THE BRIDGE

  THE SUMMONS HAD to have emerged randomly, there on the banks of Poplar Creek, and merely passed through them. It had to be a freak of nature, a phenomenon, a mutation of history. As if some higher order had decided to use them as puppets—to hold them hostage to the powerful gift whose time it was to emerge; and as if that gift, that sound, had finally been elicited by some tipping point of misery, hunger, squalor, and yearning into a finer metamorphosis. No work is ever wasted, and all waiting is ultimately rewarded.

  Their father, Floyd Brown, had a relationship with the bottle, there could be no denying that, and this, too, was surely one of the little pieces that built their sound, sharpening their ability to temper and moderate their voices, each in accordance with and adjusting to the others', even midnote, each of their three voices writhing and wrapping around the other two until a swirling, smoky sound was created. Each listening to the other keenly, with a sensitivity trained in part by trying to assess quickly—immediately—with but the faintest of clues the status of Floyd's moods. He had already lost one leg in a logging accident and was mortally afraid of losing the other, but that was not why he drank now; he had started long before that.

  The Browns would not be the first to be shaped to greatness by living in the shadow of an alcoholic parent. But their sound did not come from Floyd, or from their mother, Birdie. The sound was so elemental that it could have chosen anybody.

  Early on, in the days before they came to suspect that they had been burdened with something rare—that they had been chosen to carry it—the world nonetheless would have been preparing them for their journey, would have been teaching them, in the crudest of lessons, the paths their lives would take.

  There was an old wooden bridge that spanned Poplar Creek, down where one hollow closed in on another. The Browns lived in one of those hollows, and the moonshiners from whom Floyd bought or bartered his whiskey lived in the other. Anyone approaching the moonshiners' hollow had to go across that one bridge, so that there was no possibility of a surprise visitor, only the regular clientele.

  Floyd usually drank his supply down to almost the last drop—sometimes he took it all the way to empty—before gathering up enough coins, or eggs, or a load of prime lumber, and driving across the bridge to make his next purchase. When it was time to go, it didn't matter if they were coming home from church, or on their way to Saturday-night music over at his brother's, or en route to town for groceries: when he needed a drink, he needed a drink.

  They were all seven in the car the time that the Browns learned about bridges—had the lesson of bridges blazed indelibly into their young minds, in the architecture of myth or destiny.

  Floyd had finished his last drop and had made a run over to one of the local distillers, taking along the entire family for one reason or another. It was springtime and had been raining for a week without stopping. The woods were too muddy to log, and he didn't have any fuel to run the mill anyway. He'd been drinking for all of that rainy week, finishing the last of the last, and so when he came to the bridge, the fact that the bridge was now underwater did not deter him in the least. He could still see the trace of the bridge beneath the swollen current, the ripples indicating its approximate location; and with his family still loaded in the Model A, he eased forward, the rain coming down in sheets. Birdie fussing in the front seat, holding the baby Norma, with Maxine, Jim Ed, Bonnie, and Raymond crammed into the back.

  It was dusk, and Floyd forged on, navigating by feel alone, the tires groping for the wood that lay invisible beneath a foot of shuddering current. The creek was twelve feet deep in the center. Floyd said that they had to cross now or never, that the water was only going to get higher, and if he didn't make it now it might be a week before he could cross.

  He had not made it even halfway before he lost his way and the car tipped, spun halfway around, and angled downstream. The passengers were spilled from the car.

  There were children everywhere, bobbing and floating and grabbing for whatever parts of the car they could reach: a door handle, an open window frame, a headlight. Steam rose from the radiator as if from the blowhole of a whale. Rain lashed their faces. Birdie was screaming, grabbing Norma by the nape of the neck as if she were a kitten. Only Floyd stayed with the car, gripping the steering wheel as if temporarily befuddled, but still anticipating success.

  The car continued to lie there, swamped sideways with but one tire gripping the raised center boards of the bridge, shuddering in the current. The current was spinning the free wheels, as if the car were laboring, like a wounded animal, to resume its travels.

  Their first task was simply to hold on, but they could not hold on forever. Floyd had begun to realize the situation—the river was up to his chest—and he reached out and began pulling the children back into the flooded car one at a time. The children were creek-slick, and from time to time they would slip from his grasp, and in his grasping for the slipping-away one, the others would come temporarily unbound and he would have to sweep them all in again. Other times, the slip-away child would grab the outstretched hand of one of the other children, so that for a while, extended in the current like that, they would appear as a kite tail of children; and no one who might have looked down upon the scene would have given them any chance of coming to a good end.

  In the dusk, however, and in the rain, on the high bluff above, an old man appeared. He was barefoot and stubble-faced, wearing a rain-beaten straw hat that was misshapen now into something that resembled a tuft of moldering hay. The old man was smoking a corncob pipe from which rose, heroically, a wandering blue thread of smoke, so luminous in the dusk that it seemed the smoldering might have come not from mere tobacco but from some oil-soaked concoction of bark and wood chips. The old man was sucking on the pipestem as if drawing from it with each deepened breath the sustenance required to keep him upright in such a storm.

  He had heard the car laboring to cross the bridge, had heard Floyd's drunken gunning of the engine and the shouts and cries of the occupants as they lost their way and went over the edge. The old man held a frayed and muddy rope, at the other end of which was tethered a dirty white mule. The mule's head was pitched downward as if in defeat, beaten by the steady rain, or perhaps as if lamenting or grieving already the predicament it was witnessing below.

  For what seemed a long time the old man and the mule just stood there, as spectators—while they stood there, the dusk slid farther into darkness—though finally, as if after the most strenuous of mental assessments, the old man started down the steep road that switchbacked its way toward the river, leading the mule behind him as if to sacrificial ritual.

  At water's edge, the old man retrieved a rusty section of heavy logging cable that was coiled in a tree, used in older times as a crude ferry-assist for rowboats that had passed back and forth to the moonshiners' territory. After looping this to the mule's neck with no harness or trace, just a metal noose around the mule's muscular chest, the old man walked into the river, straight into the washboard rapids that roughly defined the bridge.

  The effect it gave was that he was walking on water. He appeared unconcerned about either the car's or his own situation, never getting in a hurry, but simply walking as if on a stroll, or as if considering that a more hurried approach might somehow disrupt the fragile friction-hold the car and its occupants had negotiated with the bridge. As if believing that if he hurried, he himself—their miraculous rescuer—might frighten them all into spilling into the river, like startled sun-basking turtles tumbling from a log with all the slipperiness of a deck of new cards clumsily shuffled.

  The old man reached the car and knelt before it tenderly, as if administering
to a wounded animal—a horse or a cow in the throes of a difficult birthing—and looped the free end of the cable around the front bumper. There was barely enough cable to reach and tie off with a knot—had Floyd lost his way only a couple of feet earlier, the cable would not have reached—and the old man had to empty his pipe and submerge briefly to finish tying the knot, taking a deep breath before disappearing beneath the water's surface with the cable.

  He reemerged, dripping, made a gesture toward Floyd, indicating he should stay put even when the car started moving, and then he trudged back toward the waiting mule, moving now in total darkness and holding on to the taut cable.

  He became invisible to them long before he reached the shore. Birdie had stopped hollering, though the baby was still crying. The children were shivering, their teeth chattering, and they clutched the car and each other and waited for the car to move.

  They wondered how strong the old mule was, and whether it would be able to find footing in the slippery clay. They could not help but imagine the mule slipping and the car falling back into the creek and going straight to the bottom, pulling the mule along behind it like a baited fishhook attached to a weighted sinker. The mule eventually bleaching to nothing but an underwater skeleton, still fastened to the wire cable, and the Brown family likewise becoming skeletal, entombed within the old Model A.

  Up in the world above, the car began to slip forward ever so slightly. The Browns felt it immediately as an increased pressure by the river, and tightened their grips. The car began to rise, lifting free and clear from its side-tipped position, being hoisted back as if cantilevered. As the car regained its footing, water came roaring out of the windows and from beneath the engine's hood and from the seams of the trunk; and suddenly the Browns were slithering back into their car, and sitting in their seats, still up to their waists in water, but afforded once more the dignity of being vertical.