Nashville Chrome

by Rick Bass

  Floyd and the crew began sawing again, growling their way farther into the forest, hunting the best and straightest trees again, extending their crude muddy roads farther into the swamp. Even on a bad day it beat the restaurant business—there was less adrenaline and less money, but there was something that remotely resembled peace, even for so unsettled a spirit as Floyd's—and it brought him some satisfaction also to know of his children's improbable success. Of his own part in that success, he was able in moments of sobriety to acknowledge that although he had been a little hard on Maxine when she was growing up, neither his or even Birdie's loving support had had anything to do with eliciting or forming that greatness. It was just a freak thing: they had been in the right time at the right place. Some force had simply wanted it to happen and had instilled the talent as well as the fire in each of them. It had next to nothing to do with Birdie and Floyd, and while he would like to have claimed to have had some hand in the matter, he couldn't.

  There were times when Floyd was almost cowed by the force. It had been benevolent, but still, the immensity of it could be intimidating. He had noted long ago that the people who were drawn to it were not frightened, but on the contrary, bold, even courageous. Maybe too much so. A little caution, a little restraint, wasn't always a bad thing.

  The early 1960s were nowhere nearly as kind as the 1950s had been. Another of their musician friends, Ira Louvin, was killed by a drunk driver. He had been one of the most revered songwriters of the time, and during the time of his crush on Maxine (he'd been in another relationship) had written the classic "I Take the Chance/(to Be With You)" for her. Emmylou Harris would go on to cover a great number of his other songs—"If I Could Only Win Your Love" and others—and "I Take the Chance," when Emmylou Harris recorded it, spent eight weeks at number one, just as it had back when the Browns first recorded it, way back in.

  Where is that invisible point where any one man's or woman's power is most fully realized? In which hour does any traveler pass through that point, crossing some indefinable threshold? Do any such travelers recognize or even sense that unseen summit?

  The gradient is mild, seems no different than all the accruing days that preceded. The ascension of power is for the most part all the traveler has ever known, so that the traveler has no concept of anything but further ascent; as well, the power of denial is strong, so that even if on that one day when certain threads and filaments began to grow slack, a traveler sensitive enough to notice such things would surely tell herself that the reservoir, the capital accumulated in all the days previous, was more than sufficient to carry the traveler and her youthful power beyond any momentary slack spot, any eddy, any resting place.

  The traveler sensitive enough to notice the slight pause in power's ascendancy would even tell herself that she was due for a rest, had earned it, and that such a pause was actually good for her, and for the power within. Almost as if the traveler—having all her life desired greatness, and power—was beginning to grow tired of it, gradually weakened by the burden.

  Most, however, step through that curtain—that one certain day, that one certain moment—with no recognition that they are passing through a veil. And the more gifted the possessor of power is, the less likely he or she is to notice anything.

  And in so doing—in the blithe passage that takes the gift, like youth, for granted—perhaps the going-away, the dissolution, is hastened. Perhaps such travelers pass from young to old with no middle journey.

  Most, however, circle back once they realize they are missing something and try desperately to find it again. They don't even realize the burning is gone—that it is now only the echo of the thing that stirs them. That they are no longer chosen.

  She is the only one left now, has been the only one left for a long time, and it is a loneliness beyond lonely, in no way commensurate with or proportionate to the pleasure that the greatness brought her.

  Bonnie got out, found a graceful way to let the greatness return to the world, as did Jim Ed—a slow, dignified release—but not a wisp of it ever left Maxine. It's simply an unsustainable venture, and there are days when she thinks she, too, will finally explode—that the top of the volcano will explode.

  Floyd's ghost leg was bothering him more, not less, but what else could he do but keep on working? He gimped through the woods on his crutches, eyeing the individual trees in the forest, looking for the best and evaluating which direction he would fell them, and planning ahead of time how to get them out of the tight embrace of the forest and back to the mill.

  It was when he was in the forest that the pains were deepest, as if it were there that the body most remembered how things had once been, recalling, in the echo of cellular transmission and the cooling neurology of the past, the days when Floyd had been at his strongest—the best days—though the discomfort and even pain was not entirely without recompense; for in the aching and throbbing, and the jolts of pain, it seemed that the leg was still there, so that Floyd was still able to work as he had before. His balance was off but he still felt whole, if flawed and in pain. He built a special chair that fastened to the base of whatever tree he was felling, and he would sit there in it for hours, sawing or chopping steadily.

  He might fell only one or two trees all morning in this manner, while the men around him sent theirs crashing down all around him in great numbers; but he was still working, still hunting the best and biggest trees, to keep him and Birdie going, if not the rest of his family, who had grown up now and proven themselves to be capable of making a living on their own.

  He wasn't the only Brown to be haunted now by how things had been. Jim Ed was having a hard time accepting the new limitations of his mill-damaged hand—of learning new chords and tempos—though strangely, people remarked that since the accident his voice had gotten even stronger, deeper and more assured. Like Floyd, however, he could feel the pain of what was no longer there, and—mercifully—the slow going-away of the unsustainable power, the gift of the maelstrom with which he had started out.

  Birdie, too, moved through the days between two worlds during this time. She loved all her children, but as her own health began to falter, she found herself wondering more, not less, what Raymond, the brightest and funniest of them all, would have been like. Wondering what her days would be like were he still in her life, still in all their lives. She knew that each and all carried a bit of him forward, but it was hard traveling on in that manner. It was worse than missing part of a hand, or a leg, and though she tried to keep her spirits up, she felt herself descending, too.

  Whenever the Browns went out on the road, which was often—in, they toured 300 of 365 days, and not one of those days was plush—Maxine left Tommy in charge of the children, but she found out later that he was not watching them, was hiring a babysitter, who wasn't doing a good job either. One of her babies had a broken leg when Maxine got home, and another got scalded by a kettle of hot water. To complicate matters, Tommy was sleeping with the babysitter, and Maxine was no longer able to fully enjoy or concentrate on her shows, wondering if her children were safe, and usually having difficulty in reaching anyone by phone, either before or after a show. She was drinking harder still by this point, but the hits kept coming: not quite as fast as only two years earlier, and not as high—some number fives and sixes and sevens—but still, people were listening to her, people were coming to hear them play.

  Floyd had another accident. A tree he was sawing began to lean, but rather than snapping off on the hinge, it pulled the whole rootwad up as it went over and took with it Floyd and his special chair, still strapped to the trunk. It launched him, as if slung from a catapult, into the branches, whereupon landing he was pinned. No other workers were nearby, and he had to cut himself free, his good leg broken badly.

  He got out on his own all right, and put off going to the hospital—why spend that kind of money if he didn't have to?—and instead was laid up at home for a few days. But the leg got infected and developed gangrene. By the time the Brow
ns got him to the hospital, it was almost too late—the poison surged, too much of it was coursing through his body, toxins everywhere, and he needed steady transfusions to keep him alive.

  It turned out he had a rare type of blood, one the doctors had never seen, and the only match that could be found was his brother—the one whose cabin had burned—and so his brother gave all that he could, which kept Floyd going for a couple more days, but then his brother could give no more and no other match could be found.

  The doctors began calling all over the country, and amazingly, they found a match from a donor in Illinois and had the donor flown to Little Rock to donate all the blood he could spare.

  It saved Floyd's life—the Illinois man alternating now with Floyd's brother—and the fever subsided, and he came home to heal up. And within a couple of months, he was back in the woods again, logging: more cautious than before, but still, pushing farther into the forest.

  Helping Floyd with his walking therapy at the hospital, Bonnie fell down the steps one day, twisting her own ankle. Floyd's kind doctor was her own age, Gene "Brownie" Ring, and he attended to her.

  He was neither flamboyant nor even terribly handsome—if anything, he was as quiet and reserved as Elvis was incandescent, as self-effacing as Elvis had been self-promoting—but the moment that Brownie first touched her ankle in the preliminary exam, she felt it, the ancient electricity. There was nothing but pleasure and longing in her from that touch, so much so that for long moments she forgot she was injured, and thought he might have healed her in that first instant.

  BORROWING THE OLDSMOBILE

  THAT WINTER, the Browns went back out touring radio stations—playing live, one song at a time, one broadcast at a time, schmoozing one station owner after another, singing into the darkness, it seemed to them, and looking back over their shoulder now at all the new stars who were following their lead, and singing with greater and greater verve, entertainers who were not in the least bit interested in either harmony or glide, musicians such as Jerry Lee Lewis, also up from out of the swamps. The Browns, though photogenic, just didn't translate to television, weren't comfortable twisting and shouting; and here, too, they were looking back over their shoulder and telling themselves to push harder, work harder, reach deeper.

  Or rather, Maxine was. Jim Ed and Bonnie were starting to slow down a little. It wasn't the workload that was getting to them; it was the pace, it was the height of the flames.

  Maxine, never a people person, was beginning to get a reputation among the station owners, all of whom were powerful old men, delighted by the novelty of touring young women, and delighted, too, by the novelty of one of those attractive young women asking the station owners for assistance. It was the same with the disc jockeys, and after a drink or three, they would inevitably cross the line with Maxine, to the point where—wired tighter and tighter each time she left home, left her children and Tommy and went out on the road, and wired tighter, too, from the first hint or suspicion that her hyperbolic rate of ascent had finally crested (and never mind that no one, or almost no one, other than Elvis was above them)—Maxine became even sharper in her criticisms, pushing to have their songs on the radio more. Her reputation grew as a woman with a hard edge. An unhappy woman, a difficult woman. She would not deign to catch flies with honey.

  The Browns would travel for two weeks, then come home for a day or two. She would have a fight with Tommy, a meal with children she barely knew—they were changing so quickly—then back out for another week. There was no rhythm beneath or within any of them now; the only rhythm or harmony that existed was that which they could fabricate, as if from the ether, with their voices. There was nothing else.

  Elvis was starting to pull away. All three Browns had watched his trajectory with only pride—success for any one of them was success for all. And though they each had different reactions to his ascent—Maxine was excited by and approving of it, Jim Ed found it amusing, and Bonnie was discomforted by it—something different was happening now. It wasn't so much that Elvis had risen above them, but that instead he was being carried away from them, no longer just some distance above them but drifting laterally. He had lost his anchor, his connection to them. He was lost in himself, and then—just one small false step, but so easy to make amid all that clamor and energy—he got lost in who his audience wanted him to be. This was not the same thing the world wanted him to be, and for that, he was doomed.

  Bonnie's unease was extraordinarily complicated by the surprising reaction she had had, meeting Brownie Ring. She hadn't ever felt such insistent hunger with Elvis. She couldn't sleep well, thinking of the young doctor, and found that almost all her waking hours were spent in dreaming schemes or fantasies about how to see him again, and how long it might be. The simplest and best thing in the world would have been to let him go, though it occurred to her that her current boyfriend, Elvis, lived essentially a thousand miles away, or farther. Elvis in Japan, Elvis in Egypt. Elvis in Australia. It wasn't just the physical distance, though. It was something else. It was the same thing Maxine had.

  She took the bold step of writing Brownie a note thanking him for the kind attention he had shown her father and her. She said that he might not remember her, but that she was sure he remembered her father, who was recuperating nicely.

  "I don't remember any one-legged man," he wrote back. "I do remember tending to the ankle of a beautiful young woman from Poplar Creek," he wrote back. "I remember it well."

  Each of the Browns saw Elvis now in a slightly different light, or chose to observe a different part of him, like the blind man with the elephant; but as to the moment when they first realized he not only had risen above them but was beginning to detach, drifting to the point where he might not ever be able to find his way back home, they would each concur. For them, that realization was as stark and dramatic as a fixed point on a timeline.

  He had just gotten back from the army, where, while certainly not absent from the public eye, he had been a little constricted, after having previously known such freedom, such whirl, such roar. He had always been handsome, but now there was something else about him that drove girls and women wild, more than even before. Some desperation, some acknowledgment of waste or loss. It wasn't the seed or flaw of rot—it was something else. The pain of the knowledge of the wrong path chosen, perhaps, or at least the suspicion.

  The women were throwing their clothes at him, screaming, drowning out the sound of his music. They swooned, fell over in dead faints; mass hysteria washed through the crowds like the fast-moving shadow of a lone cloud passing over a field.

  When he came back to visit the Browns, it was as if he could still recognize them, could remember who they were and what they meant to him, but otherwise, there was some internal meter, some rhythm, that was different now, and that prevented him from moving in step with them, made it difficult even to converse. In its worst moments, it was like the dreams of opening one's mouth to call out but being unable to speak: no sound coming out.

  They sat around the kitchen table and tried to talk about where they had each been and where they were going next, but that was all there was.

  It seemed to each of the Browns almost as if there was a little bit of meanness in him now, whereas before there had never been such a thing. It wasn't really meanness—it was more just a fear that had gotten hold of him. Having made it to the top of the world, he'd seen how far he had to fall and couldn't bear the thought of not being loved. Every day had become double or nothing.

  It made no sense. The Browns were selling almost as many records. It made no sense to Maxine.

  It wasn't just Elvis who was drifting, however. It seemed that way to Jim Ed and Maxine, but what they didn't see was that Bonnie's attachment had loosened as well, and that she, too, like Elvis, was moving away from them all. Unlike Elvis, however, she was moving toward happiness, more of it than she already possessed and inhabited. It was still a dream world, this idea of a life with Brownie, but she could see the step
s that were required to pass from that dream world into the real one, and it did not seem an insurmountable challenge.

  The incident that clarified for each of them the magnitude of Elvis's drift, if not Bonnie's, came for them that same winter. The Browns were all three back home for a week, helping out around the house and playing a little music. They were resting up from the tour.

  Tommy had disappeared the day after Maxine had arrived—they simply could not abide each other any longer—and Bonnie was helping Maxine take care of the babies. They'd been home for a few days when the phone rang in the middle of the night. It was Elvis calling for Floyd. He didn't even know the Browns were back home, and neither did he ask if they were. Elvis and his band were broken down outside of Shreveport and needed a ride. They had to be in Nashville the next afternoon, so Floyd and Bonnie drove out there to get him. They each took a car. Floyd would loan Elvis his new Oldsmobile. It rained cats and dogs the whole way.

  When Floyd and Bonnie got there, they beheld a sorry mess. Elvis and his band had been sitting in their broken-down car all night, drinking, and from time to time they'd gotten out and stood in the rain, trying to tinker with the car's engine, something they knew absolutely nothing about, before getting drenched and climbing back into the car and drinking some more. There were three of them: Elvis; his bass player, Bill Black; and guitarist Scotty Moore. None of them was ready yet to be driving Floyd's Oldsmobile, so Floyd and Bonnie had to drive both cars all the way back to Poplar Creek and get them showered and fed and dressed before they were sober enough to take the car on up to Nashville.