Nashville Chrome

by Rick Bass

  Floyd and the Browns didn't really think much about it—the band was just boys being boys—and Elvis seemed grateful enough, and a little embarrassed at having gotten them up in the middle of the night. But it was good that he had someone to turn to when he needed help and they were glad he had called, were happy to help him anytime. He said thank you and goodbye, and that he would have the car back to Floyd in a week at the most, and then they headed on up the road.

  Floyd didn't see him for another six months. None of them saw Elvis during that same period, but he'd made a movie while he was gone, and the next time he came through Pine Bluff he was in a pink Cadillac, riding around with Colonel Tom Parker, wearing the white suit and the big sunglasses. He had his picture in the paper, wearing those clothes and sitting on the fender of that new Cadillac, but despite being that close to Poplar Creek, had not made it by to see them. They waited, and worried, and nursed their disappointment, trying to make it smaller—trying to keep it in a separate compartment, each of them, from all the rest of him that each of them knew and loved—but like smoke, their disappointment seeped through the cracks and began to infiltrate everything.

  Floyd waited another couple of weeks, then called Elvis and asked him where his car was, and Elvis said he'd have a driver return it to him. And he did, about a week later, but it didn't look like the same car. It had dings and dents in it, and was all scratched up, as if someone had been driving it through the brush. The tread was worn off the tires, and he had put 30,000 miles on the car. It was dusty and dirty; he hadn't even bothered to have it washed.

  Even then, the Browns didn't blame him. They were sad and uneasy about who he was becoming—about who he had become—but they understood better than anyone the howling forces that were buffeting him: the winds that would either snuff out his fire or fan it into something unmanageable.

  They viewed his drift as more of an illness than a character flaw. "He'd just gone crazy," Bonnie said whenever she talked about him to Maxine. "It was so sad, so disappointing."

  There was a part of her that tried to hold on to him in her heart, late at night when she was alone—just before sleep—but the pragmatic part of her understood he was already gone, and that the pain she was feeling wasn't so much for herself, or even for him, but instead for something that simply wasn't there anymore.

  At the same level, they must have understood that it wasn't just Elvis who was being lost to them, but that they, too, were somehow vanishing.

  Jim Ed sanded and buffed the car himself once they got it back. By that time, they didn't have enough money to fix it.

  "If you squint your eyes, or if the car is moving, you can't really tell," he said hopefully when he was finished.

  "No," Bonnie said, "you can tell."

  Floyd died in his sleep that winter, while the Browns were out on one of their circuits. He had fallen ill with a cold from having been out working in the woods in the rain, but had not seemed overly sick—he had been in bed for only a couple of days, with a fever and chills and a cough, nothing more. He had a drink of moonshine that night, with the cabin warm—Birdie had been keeping the woodstove in the bedroom popping, so that his uneasy sleep would have been punctuated by the sound of burning. Fever and chills, up and down, throwing the heavy quilts off, then pulling them back over him, before finally hitting a kind of calm glide and sleeping easily.

  He felt that he might have turned the corner and was possibly even anticipating work the next day—the winter rain continuing to beat down on the roof, but no matter, he was warm and dry—but then there was only silence. He simply left them, with no drama or outrage, no sentimental preparations, no turmoil; as if all of those things that had constituted their days together, in all the moments and years preceding this one, had not been how he was, but as if instead the quiet truth had finally been revealed, despite the condition of his disease: that beneath the drinking and the drama—beneath the fear of what, he never knew—he had been a hard worker and a provider. A shelter, even if a flawed one, for their greatness. And above all, a fan.

  They all took it hard—Birdie, the hardest, and Maxine, she whom he had battled so fiercely, suffering the loss, the passing on, in some ways even harder, with it seeming to her that Floyd had somehow gotten the last word just as she was beginning to forgive him for the unpredictability, the chaos, with which he had imbued their childhood, and from which their gift, their ability to impose a bewitching calm, had emerged.

  Now that he was gone, and without the complications of his drinking, she could see how much he had loved all of them—even her, the one who had screamed how she hated him. Now that he was gone, she could see clearly that the full weight of his ceaseless pride, like Birdie's, was the same thing as love, as elemental as love but simply unvoiced, and she was furious with him for not having been able to articulate it in other ways, and furious at herself for not having seen it or heard it back when it had existed.

  Sometime that winter, and into the spring, music became work. None of them could have said where or why, only that it had changed. They still sounded the same, but the world had changed, they were in a quicker current, and something else had gone away, and the fun was wearing out.

  BROWNIE DISPLACES THE KING

  Can I come see you, one of the letters said. Not at a show, but at your home. I'd like to see where you live, would like to see where you come from.

  Panic and exultation seized her simultaneously. She had suspected she wanted him in her life, but she had not known it. Terrified that if he came, he might be repulsed by the primitive conditions of her home, she nonetheless knew no other answer to give him but yes.

  As she had once counseled Maxine to avoid Tommy, now Maxine came to her, advising her not to quit Elvis. It was a complicated piece of business in at least three directions. Elvis was their friend, almost like family, and to some degree he was embedded in their careers, and—now that he had gotten out ahead of them—he could do so much for them. He could reach back and help pull them through the curtain that separated fame from immortality, Maxine believed, though if he was married to Bonnie, he wouldn't even have to reach back and pull; they could just stroll on through, and be carried into that land. Could inhabit that land as if it had been no struggle at all to get there.

  There was the third and least savory direction, the part that made Maxine feel not very good about herself. Her own marriage had been a failure—it had been Tommy's fault, not hers, but still, a failure—while Bonnie, as usual, was skating through life, had captured the heart of the most eligible or desirable bachelor in the world. It wasn't what nice people did, competing with their own sisters, and yet when Maxine considered a future without Elvis in their lives, and a Bonnie without that jolting radiance, the charisma that surrounded both of them when they were together, she had to admit, she felt a curious small relief, if not true pleasure.

  "Go ahead and invite Brownie here, if you have to," Maxine said. "I wouldn't mind getting another look at him anyway. But you don't have to decide right now. You don't have to act rashly. You can think about it for a while, and decide later."

  "Oh, I wouldn't do that," Bonnie said. "I wouldn't invite him if I hadn't already made up my mind."

  Maxine was incredulous. It was unlike anything Bonnie had ever done; Maxine had never known her to be anything but careful and cautious.

  "What instrument does he play?" Maxine asked. "Does he sing?" Meaning, He can't possibly play or sing like Elvis. She felt the old desperation rising in her, the ferocity of grip— Go after what you want, get hold of it, and don't let go —and was surprised to find how fiercely she was advocating for Elvis, how desperately she did not want him out of their lives.

  "He doesn't know anything about music," Bonnie said, almost gaily. "He doesn't care anything about it at all. He's deaf in one ear," she said.

  "Deaf?" Maxine said. If Bonnie had slapped her, she could not have been more offended.

  "He got his medical degree on the GI Bill," she said. "He was i
n the navy, worked with the cannons on battleships, loading them for artillery practice. He can't hear a thing out of his left ear, and his right ear isn't real good."

  "This is a joke," Maxine said. "You're teasing, right?"

  "Come on," Bonnie said, taking her hand. "I have an envelope to mail to my love. Come walk with me down to the mailbox."

  He came in a freak spring snowstorm, a wet, heavy snow that pulled down and then broke limbs and branches everywhere, so that all of Arkansas looked as if a tornado had blown through. The storm knocked out all the power lines, so that the entire region was without phone or electricity; people in cities and towns were reduced to gathering the runoff of snowmelt from their roofs and boiling water for coffee and tea in their fireplaces, as many of them had done before the period of new affluence had spread slowly into the region. Few if any of them were but a generation removed from such hard times, and for many of them, the storm was a welcome pause, a reminder of where they had come from and how their lives had been; a touchstone for their old identities.

  On through it all, Brownie drove, marveling at the slow descent of the huge swirling flakes, the deep silence of the storm, and the world it was briefly altering, in synchrony for once with the hushed world he so often inhabited. Here, there was no variance between the shapes of things at the surface and the objects below, beneath the accruing blanket of snow.

  He drove carefully, eager to see Bonnie, but paradoxically feeling there was no need to hurry, that he would get there when he needed to be there, and that all was right with the world. He would not have been conscious of the page of any history book of the world turning, but he was keenly aware of a break, a momentousness, in his own, and he was not afraid.

  Usually when people looked at him, they thought he was mild, a figure of respect and authority, certainly, with the ability to heal people—but mild. He was reserved, it was true; he was dignified and undaring, completely averse to risks, educated as he was in statistics and probabilities—but he was a bombardier, too, had been trained to fire only the largest shells at the largest targets, so that only once was necessary.

  He was mild, but he loved life fiercely. Maybe that made him not-mild. Regardless, he had won her heart, had displaced a fairy-tale king, had vanquished an icon. No one would ever know his name or identity, just as they would one day soon no longer know Bonnie's or Jim Ed's or Maxine's, but his life was about to become huge, as was hers—more perfect, and in its own way, more daring—and he drove on, comforted by the hush, and by the way the snow covered everything, every stilled and sleeping shape.

  She had mailed him a hand-lettered map to their cabin, with cartoon representations, like a child's treasure map, of forests, dirt roads, cabins with chimney smoke, to assure him he was on the right path. It was an intricate map, not drawn at all to scale—the representations of things grew ever larger the closer he came to his destination—and he kept it spread on the passenger seat and pulled over from time to time to study it, being careful to not veer off the road and get stuck in the beautiful snow. Wanting to approach in quiet and unobtrusive style. Not wanting to have to walk miles to a stranger's cabin, where there might or might not be a phone, to call and ask for help.

  All of the landmarks, it seemed, were on the map; as if Bonnie had known how the strange new landscape would appear to him, a first-time traveler. The abandoned tractor, the white bulldog that would come charging down from out of the Franklins' yard, untethered by rope or chain, a seemingly ageless dog that hated all vehicles and that for years had dictated great looping detours for any passersby on foot. Brownie was prepared for the dog, but did not see it coming at him in the snow until it was already up against the side of his car, silent and stealthy, not a barker but a killer, its claws scrabbling against the side of his car like branches in a storm, the dog's black button eyes and flared nostrils the only thing Brownie saw at first, and then the pink of the dog's gaping mouth, the slavering tongue, and finally, yellowish white amid white amid purer white, the old dog's fangs snapping and biting.

  Brownie did just what Bonnie had instructed him—what local motorists had learned to do. He slowed the car further, timed the dog's leap perfectly, and then opened his door quickly, halfway, as if inviting the dog in for a ride, but instead smacked the dog midleap with the iron door wing. There was a single yelp, not so much of pain as disappointment, and then Brownie shut his door quickly and kept motoring on, slowly, deeper into the wilderness.

  The hulking abandoned sawmill appeared finally, mythic in its disrepair—merely a shell now, a crumbling museum of what briefly had been—and he drove on farther, past the giant stumps, with the younger trees growing up thick around them now, and then, at the end of the road, more beautiful than he had been hoping or imagining, he saw the dark cabin with its own smoke thread rising, its own yellow squares of light in the early gloom, its own unbroken field of snow in the small yard.

  Other cars were parked out front, snow shrouded—no one had traveled anywhere all day—and as he shut his lights off to approach in privacy, and turned his motor off and got out, the falling snow quickly mantling on his shoulders and his hat, he turned his good ear toward the cabin and heard faintly the tunes of enthusiastic music, balanced perfectly against all the other stillness, and he knew that if with his damaged hearing he could hear the music, it must indeed be boisterous.

  In the center of one of the dull yellow windows he could see a slightly brighter portal, a hand-rubbed viewpoint of scraped-away steam and frost, and even as he stood there, he saw a hand appear, rubbing vigorously yet again, and saw Bonnie's face filling the space just behind the screen of falling snow.

  At first she did not see him, motionless as he was amid the snow—but then she saw his parked car, the only unshrouded thing in the yard, and then he raised a hand to wave at her, as if he were rubbing at a similar windowpane.

  Her face disappeared quickly from the window and then the door flew open and she was hurrying out to greet him. Maybe it wasn't proper, maybe she didn't know him as well as she thought she did, but maybe she knew him better, for all the words that had passed between them, with the richness of space separating their words, a week at a time—three days in the mail for a letter outgoing, three days coming back, with a day off for Sunday—and Bonnie wrapped him in a snowy hug, kissed him quickly before she could even wonder at it, and before her family came outside, unconvinced yet that her rash leap of heart was wise or even considered.

  The music kept playing, though—they were midsong—and she kissed him again. Snow on both of them. He had brought flowers not just for her but for Birdie and Maxine and Norma, and he ducked back into the car to get them, three bouquets of yellow tulips and one of red, each brilliant in the snow and dim light of early evening.

  The music was still winding down, and Maxine came out onto the porch in time to see Bonnie escorting Brownie up toward the steps, her arm linked in his, and looking already like a bride in white. The bouquets as brilliant as three torches, Bonnie and Brownie laughing at something, and an overwhelming wave of franticness—was it jealousy, or something even larger?—overtaking Maxine. She noted with that same feeling of terror the scufflemarks of their embrace in the snow, the space of it already being quickly covered, and she felt it again, stronger and deeper, like a third chord struck.

  They came up onto the porch slowly, not caring at all that they were being covered with snow, and Bonnie introduced Maxine to Brownie, who shook her hand warmly but somehow also with the formality of his profession. "These are for you," he said, handing her one of the bouquets of yellow tulips, their cupped heads half filled with the immense flakes, and she managed a protest: "You shouldn't have, thank you, that's so sweet."

  "I'm glad to get to meet you," he said, and Maxine said, "So am I." She was glad to have him out on the porch for a short while, away from the rest of her family, where she could study him more critically, but he and Bonnie were already stamping the snow from their feet and shaking it from their clot
hes, and then going past her, opening the door and stepping into the cabin. Maxine turned and followed.

  There was an immediate outcry of welcome, a cheer for the heroism of the arrival—a greeting that far exceeded, Maxine realized, her own subdued welcoming.

  The snow melted almost instantly from Brownie's and Bonnie's shoulders as they stepped into the woodstove heat of the cabin, so that for a moment they glistened as if cast into ice statues—but in a blink that sheen dissolved, steam was rising from both of them and Brownie was stepping forward, shaking hands and passing out the glistening tulips, and when he was done, he apologized to Jim Ed but said that he had something warm for him later. Brownie didn't drink much at all—there was rarely time for it with his work, and when he had any spare time, he craved and sought sleep as another might seek that whiskey—but when he did take a rare sip, he made sure that it was of good stock and not rotgut swill.

  For all of the woodstove's robust heat, there were currents of cold air, frigid little pools and rivers where the outside air seeped in between certain logs or eddied beneath certain places in the loft, and the Browns knew intimately the map of these places, were arranged around the cabin in such a way as to avoid them. The cold rivers, invisible to all, flowed around each of them but touched none of them, and Bonnie took Brownie's arm and pulled him over to sit next to her on one of the islands of warmth as if pulling him to safety.

  They told stories deep into the evening. Such was his hunger for their stories that they set down their guitars and for once spoke rather than sang—consolidating, over the evening, some of their greatest hits, stories Brownie needed to know about each of them. Edging close, on a couple of occasions, to a mentioning of Elvis, but veering tactfully away just in time. They spoke loudly so that he could hear, and the volume of their storytelling encouraged others to pitch in; even quiet Norma had a story. It was the best night they had had as a family since Floyd had died, and at different points of the evening each of them had the thought of how much he would have enjoyed it, even as they knew perhaps he might not have—that as always, with Floyd, things could have gone either way.