by Rick Bass
Unbeknownst to Jim Ed, Maxine borrowed a tape recorder and made a copy of Jim Ed imitating one of Hank Snow's songs and sent it in to the radio station. No light, she told herself, can be kept beneath its bushel forever.
All that next week, the first week of June, Maxine insisted that Jim Ed and Bonnie accompany her when she walked up the long clay road to the mailbox. Bonnie and Jim Ed protested, but then one day there it was, the letter addressed to Jim Ed, the script of the typewriter skewed and weak, the two-cent stamp canceled by hand, and inside, the warm invitation to an opportunity he had never dreamed even existed.
Just for a moment, he grinned when he first read the envelope, but following that, he had a strange reaction.
"Don't control my life that way," he said. "You should have asked. I know you meant to surprise me, but you should have asked."
Maxine was incredulous. "Do you mean to tell me you don't want to do it?" she asked. The three of them were standing around in the yellow heat of summer, Maxine and Jim Ed arguing as if over the tally in a game of hopscotch, rather than inhabiting a moment that would change so much. As if their arguments or decisions had any bearing on the turning of the world anyway, now that it had begun.
"No," Jim Ed said, his anger fading, "that's not what I mean." He smiled again, uncertain as to what he was feeling and why he had experienced a moment of pique, and then they turned and went running back down to the house to tell the others the news.
He stole the first show he played, became the established favorite within a month, and after only two months brought Maxine and Bonnie onto the show. They decided to call their group the Browns, nothing fancy, and that evening they received their first standing ovation, more powerful than any drug. The strange pulse of satisfaction rippled through each of them, waves of applause that were indistinguishable from love. Jim Ed devoured it, and even Bonnie, already secure and level-headed for a beautiful young woman who had just been anointed a star, enjoyed it enormously, lark though it was for her.
It was Maxine who was most strongly affected, however. After that first show was over, she couldn't stop thinking about it, nor could she live without it. It was as if her soul had flown out of her body that night. When would it be back? Even now, she wonders.
FABOR
THERE WAS A HUNTER who was drawn to The Barnyard Frolic, and who sought to exploit the local talents that passed through there. His name was Fabor Robinson, and he had made a fair amount of money by signing the various starry-eyed backwoods country youth who played for the Frolic. The Browns should have known better, as should have the hundreds who preceded them, though none of the others possessed what the Browns held.
It was like a slaughterhouse. Fabor would greet the young artist backstage immediately following his or her performance, while the adrenaline was still shimmering so strongly in the blood that it was as if the singer or musician were in an altered state. He would congratulate her, would compare her favorably to whatever icon she had been imitating that night, and he would say that he had an association with whomever she most admired or revered; that he did business with that star, had connections and access; and that he could envision that star becoming a mentor to the young talent.
He would have papers at the ready, and because the singers were desperate and starving and in love with what they were doing, they always signed. He signed them under the age of eighteen, no matter, with or without parental consent or witness, and then he went to certain radio stations and bribed the disc jockeys to make a hit of this-or-that single—one of the songs to which he now held all the titles—and while a star might be born, a star would most assuredly not get paid.
It shames Maxine to remember how gullible they were. For a long time, things had been simple, and any hungers they ever had were physical, but once the world discovered their sound, they knew a different kind of hunger. The size and magnitude of it, she realizes now, was precisely the size of the world's hunger, though for what, even now, she cannot say for sure.
"Did you grow up raised by Hank?" Fabor had asked Jim Ed, that first night. "Are you his bastard son? You're better than Hank Snow," he said. And after Fabor came to understand that Maxine made the decisions for the Browns, he began working her, putting a hunger into her—or building a pathway by which the world's hunger could enter.
"Incomparable," he said, "a siren, a star. Enchanting." He didn't compare her to anyone, for there was no one to whom she compared; but neither did he dwell on the fact that some of the beauty of her sound came from being a part of the whole.
"I hope you're ready to become a star," he said, "because you already are one. Look at you," he said. "You're smart, you're beautiful, and you've got the voice of an angel. Look at you. Are you ready to be a star?" Gazing at Bonnie then, before turning to Jim Ed. "Young Mr. Snow," he said, and he was aware of Maxine's new-kindled ravening, the gust or gasp of it when he turned his attention to another.
It was like shooting fish in a barrel. He got the Browns, though they certainly didn't need him to bribe the radio station: once the station managers heard their harmony, they wanted to play them anyway.
And just like that, they were owned for life. He had taken their power, had stolen their magic as surely as if capturing three fireflies in a glass bottle. They were so naïive, they didn't even recognize the wrongness of it: as if they were lambs looking up with twitching tails and stepping toward the approach of the lion.
Most of Fabor's stable of slaves for life—his contracts, legal and binding, owned everything they would ever do; any disbursements by him to them were to be at his discretion, following adjustments for his overhead and administration—were non-talents, church choiristers and nickel-balladeers, barely worth the trouble of recording, much less promoting. But over the years he had managed to snare a few big fish, the largest of which was Gentleman Jim Reeves, who had already been enslaved by a personal services contract to Fabor for years, and who was utterly miserable, despite his success on the radio playlists and in the hearts of those who sat around their radios every weekend listening to his gentle, steady crooning. No one would ever have guessed at his anguish beneath the surface, or the drinking. His persona was that of Gentleman Jim, and he kept it up in public, no matter how awful his life was.
Reeves and his wife, Mary, were only about ten years older than the Browns, but were pretty hammered by the road when they met the Browns, playing with them at a show in Shreveport that Fabor had set up. It was in a high school auditorium, the most people they had ever played for before, and looked as glamorous to them as it did dispiriting and run down to Jim Reeves, who at that time was just beginning the downside of his career—still riding fairly high on old hits but not making many new ones.
Mary Reeves was elegant, thin to the point of a knifeblade, like Maxine herself, and a wearer of furs at even the least of opportunities: any faint breeze from the north that might drop the temperature below fifty. Jim was as carefree as Jim Ed, and they hit it off right from the start. "So you're the one Fabor's been talking about who's going to put me out of business," Jim Reeves said. "Do me a favor and do it quickly." He took out a flask and handed it to Jim Ed. "To the next Hank Snow," Jim said, "and to the Browns. Welcome," he said. "You're in the family now."
Jim went onstage first, then called the Browns up, introduced them on the heels and good tidings of his own performance. He handed his audience over to them, stepped back, and played backup the rest of the night, and laughed when he saw that the Browns did not really understand how good they were, and that for now at least they were just running on the power of youth, that they knew nothing, and that everything was new.
Jim remembered those days, and so did Mary. They had signed with Fabor ten years earlier, but it felt like a hundred. They had both long ago traveled beyond any notions of or hopes for newness; but when they were around the Browns, they could remember it; and when they heard them sing, they definitely remembered it.
They took the Browns under their wing and
helped take care of them as best as they could. The venues were small and the paths leading to them roughshod; cars rode so much stiffer in those days, and the shows usually required the use of back roads, with the stars driving their own vehicles—and while Fabor stayed in luxury hotels throughout the South, the Browns and Jim and Mary slept in their cars, huddled in blankets, when they slept at all. Usually, they were driving, pushing hard to arrive at the next gig just in time to take to the stage.
It was hard work, but it was no sacrifice; the Browns were in a groove, and despite the physical hardships and the emotional toil of being Fabor's slaves, it was for each of them the best time of their lives. They had found the steel rails laid out for them and were proceeding with great verve. None of the other mattered. They were fitting the world and yet also traveling just above it, creating a newer and alternative world—making adventures each day that paralleled the world below, but which were brighter, sharper, more deeply felt.
Maxine was getting her nightly applause, the soon predictable standing ovations. Jim Ed was sleeping with different women every night, and Bonnie was content with the beauty of the sound.
None of them was in it for the money, and that was fortunate, for there was none. They had a song soar right to the top of the charts, number one on the country list—"Looking Back to See"—and for this Fabor doled out a whopping $170 that year.
They were puzzled by the accounting, and Maxine called Fabor up in California and asked where the other checks were.
"That's it," he said, "but you should consider yourself lucky: it takes most artists two or three years before they earn back their expenses and even get their first check. You can ask Jim Reeves about that."
She did, and Jim grimaced and shook his head and said, "He's right; you're pretty much screwed."
On the surface, it looked glamorous—driving all around Arkansas, when before they'd rarely been out of Poplar Creek, and receiving applause every evening, no matter where they played, and doing what they loved. It would have seemed glamorous, too, and perhaps it was.
But in between those two places—the glamorous surface and the beautiful core of the heart—the miles were hard, maybe not as hard for young people as for those who'd been at it for years, like Jim and Mary, but tough nonetheless. It wasn't a life you would want for anyone you cared about—and if someone did get into such a life, you would want them to get back out as quickly as possible.
Fabor was a lecher. It was rare to find a young woman back then willing to tour. It's hard to imagine that only one lifetime separates the difficulties experienced by a handful of trailblazers like Maxine and Bonnie. Back then, it was so outrageous and outlandish for a woman to leave home—much less to get up on a stage for the express purpose of entertaining a largely male audience—that the basic assumption was that that woman was cheap and easy and desperate. Even some of their male counterparts in other bands made that assumption and pressured them relentlessly, but always, the audiences and promoters did.
It was Bonnie upon whom Fabor set his relentless sights. Subtlety was not his forte, and he was after her from the first moment he saw her, telling her, among other things, that a woman who was a virgin had a different, weaker voice than one who was not, and that it was his duty as her representative and agent to help her strengthen her voice to its fullest potential.
She wasn't going to sleep with him, of course—not to improve her voice or for any other reason—but she worried about it, was made a little insecure by the gnawing that she was somehow holding her siblings back.
Fabor used them hard that first year; toured them all over hell and back, barely paying them enough for meals, and on the nights when audience numbers were low—playing in a club where ten or twelve people showed—he would berate them, calling them lazy. They turned out another number one hit, "Here Today and Gone To morrow," but then, afraid that their success would skyrocket too fast and that he might somehow lose control of them, he began releasing the worst cuts of some of their studio re-takes, including a wretched song called "Itsy Bitsy Witsy Me," which they had sung just for fun, in falsetto, with off-key piano work. It was never meant to be recorded, much less released on the radio.
"Why in the hell would he do that?" Maxine asked Jim. "It's an embarrassment. Why would he want to sandbag us?"
"It's complicated," Jim said. "Part of him wants to be rich and part of him wants to be king. I can't even say he's got a split personality, because I've never seen anything good in him. It's a bad deal," Jim said, "but we're healthy, we're doing what we love, and we're having some good times. Am I right? Are we having some good times?"
"You're right," Maxine said. "We're having some good times, but that doesn't mean he's still not a sonofabitch."
"He is that," he agreed. "It takes some getting used to." Jim was silent for a moment, then picked up his guitar and played a few melancholy chords, spacing them far enough apart so that gentleness, if not peace, might fill in, and fit.
It was as if Fabor viewed them all as he would a herd of sheep, or goats, or cattle. Floyd was controlling, but nothing like this; Floyd's destructiveness was turned inward, while Fabor's seemed only to radiate outward, burning with menace.
At larger venues, where Fabor made each of his musicians play only two or three songs, presenting a dozen or more musicians to an audience on any one night, he insisted that each and every performer remain onstage after his or her last song, for the duration of the evening—on display but no longer performing, sitting there in a chair onstage with a stupid smile—the adrenaline from the musicians' own performances leaching away quickly now while the newest act played B and sang and received the next round of applause. It was brutal, it was ridiculous, and even the audiences were discomforted by it.
Fabor advertised his traveling show as "The Fabor Robinson String Music Act," but the performers and audiences began calling it the Fabor Robinson Strange Music Act.
He was tone deaf; he favored loud over soft, fast over slow, surface over depth, style over substance.
Still, the Browns were able to tolerate him, for a while. It was a piece of rotten luck, they told themselves—before signing with Fabor, they had sent a demo tape to RCA, but that letter had gotten lost in a pile in New York; less than a week after they had all three signed with Fabor, an offer had come from RCA, but it was too late then.
It didn't matter, at first. They had come out of the woods, their gift had maneuvered them from out of the most desolate obscurity into something resembling the larger world or a crack or fissure leading out into the larger world—and in the beginning, their being hostages did not yet matter so much, for they were being heard, and everyone who heard them loved them, would love them forever. There were, they believed, far worse things than being imprisoned.
BUDDY
THE LITTLE DOG is the light of her life, or is to the extent that she'll allow another to hold that much power over her. She pretends that a large part of her days are not centered around his regular appearances. He comes over to see her in the morning, not long after she's gotten up and has made her tea and is sitting in the kitchen reading the paper, scowling at the news but somehow pleased also by each day's verification of her views on the disintegration of culture. The entitlement of affluence, the aversion to hard work, the immodesty and promiscuity, the greed and selfishness, the savage civil wars and collapsing environment ... It's all there and she scans it quickly, pretty much knowing what the gist will be, while she waits for Buddy to show up at the back door, with a presence to which she is so attuned that she imagines she can discern his approach through the synchrony of their two hearts beating as he draws ever closer, yard by yard: stopping at each of his signposts to scent-mark, investigating each garden and every sandbox, trotting primly along his route, through gaps in the miscellany of sagging chain-link fences and cedar-split rail fences, working his way toward her through a fairly convoluted routing, so that it is not as if Maxine's backyard is merely another stop along the way but is ins
tead his sole destination.
How her heart leaps when, in the accruing stillness of her waiting, she hears the distant scold of a blue jay in the Millers' backyard, indicating that Buddy is passing through. She smiles, takes a sip of tea—He always comes to see me. Such pleasure, or, if not quite pleasure, satisfaction, will never end; his arrivals and their effect on her are as constant and mythic as those of each day's rising of the sun. And five or six beats later, she hears the fussing of the mockingbird in the yard next door as Buddy crosses over, ceaseless in his predictability. She's all but deaf, but she sits with her better ear turned and tuned to his approach, and it seems that she can still occasionally hear what she wants to hear.
She rises as quickly as she can from her chair—how did it get to be this time in the morning so fast? After so much waiting, why is time moving so quickly now?
It was precisely this way when she was drinking: the fearful yet delighted edginess in her blood, and the delicious pretending that things were otherwise—that the edginess was not there. Trying to control it, but only barely, and in the end, not.
The visual aura—certain things at the periphery dimming while others become more illuminated, even gilded—and the tightening also of aural intensities, with some sounds becoming so much sharper as to be almost painful. The quickened heartbeat, to the point of palpitations, and the rush of anticipatory endorphins: always, the best part about drinking was the very last second, right before the first sip was taken.
But the sip had to be taken in order to complete the cycle. In order to begin it all over again and start the journey back toward anticipation.
So it is with Buddy's daily arrivals. Maxine gathers the little scraps she has been saving for him (sometimes she splurges and opens a can of dog food, though as fond as she is of him, she tries not to do this too often) and opens the door to see him waiting there, just a tad impatient, but otherwise a perfect little gentleman, a silver-frosted little wirehaired terrier looking utterly distinguished, his eyes bright with his own waiting.
