Nashville Chrome

by Rick Bass

  Further into the evening Brownie took out the elegant silver flask he had brought for Jim Ed and handed it to him.

  "But I wanted the tulips!" Jim Ed protested. He took a too large gulp and made a small, satisfied groaning sound, then passed it around. The singers and Brownie each took a sip, while Norma and Birdie abstained. Later in the night everyone except Birdie went outside and made snow angels. The snow was still falling, the temperature right at freezing so that the flakes clumped and coalesced, some of them appearing to the upturned faces of the outstretched revelers as large as sheets of paper swirling down, while sparks from the chimney popped and spewed upward into the storm.

  When they went back inside, the whole porch shook with their combined boot stamping and snow whacking, and finally—it was almost midnight—they went to bed, Brownie sleeping on a pallet in front of the fire. Norma had offered Brownie her small room, saying she could sleep with Birdie, but Brownie wouldn't hear of it. Maxine cut warning eyes at Bonnie, cautioning her against any late-night or early-morning revelry out by the fire, but she needn't have worried; desperate for sleep, Brownie had fallen as if into narcolepsy the instant everyone got up to go to their rooms, and Bonnie covered him with an extra blanket, touched his firelit cheek, and never looked back, never gave a second thought to where she was going.

  He stayed for two days. He had babies due to deliver soon and was uneasy about being gone, but was having the time of his life. Everyone slept late that first morning, and then before the snow melted—it would do so quickly, in the manner of spring storms—he walked down to the mill with Jim Ed, who showed him where he had lost his fingers, and where Floyd had lost his leg. Family lore, just beneath the snow, and already the cold sun beginning to melt that shroud, with the sound of dripping starting slowly and snow-draped branches springing to life all around them. Jim Ed did not show him where Raymond had fallen—not that, yet—but Brownie understood that he was visiting a hallowed battlefield. The mill hulking there like Atlantis exposed by a gone-away ocean, and the wet snow sliding from it in sheets and slabs.

  By that evening, all but a few patches of the snow was gone, and the creek was running so wild that there was no way any of them would have been able to cross. At dinner that night they told the story of Floyd and his bridge crossing, and still more stories. Brownie had noticed Birdie's difficulty in getting up and down from her seat and asked if she had had arthritis for long, asked if he could take a look at her ankles, knees, wrists, hands. The children were surprised when she said yes, and while his prescription was not revolutionary—ice for five minutes in the mornings before she got going, and again late in the afternoon—she was flattered and happy, and promised to obey his orders.

  Norma had no ills, and when Brownie asked if Maxine had anything she needed tending to, she said, "You can't win me over, so don't even bother."

  "What did you say?" Brownie said. "I can't hear you. Can you speak up?" But he was smiling.

  The next morning he went turkey hunting with Jim Ed. All the snow was gone, and the creek, though still high, was passable again—and despite Brownie's diminished hearing, he was a good enough caller to lure a nice gobbler in for Jim Ed, who shot it, one of the largest he'd ever gotten, and their new friendship was sealed that easily.

  Birdie roasted the turkey that evening—Thanksgiving in April, with baked sweet potatoes and lemon pie. Though Brownie didn't eat nearly as much as Elvis, he helped with the dishes, made an icepack for Birdie's ankles, and insisted that she stay off her feet that evening.

  It was really no contest, and while an observer looking at the surface of the relationships might have expressed shock at Bonnie's cutting loose of Elvis, a more careful examiner would have remembered that there are occasionally even in the world of men and women—with mankind still so newly arrived in and not yet fully shaped to the world—certain fits so elegant and fulfilling as to seem predesigned or destined, and when Brownie left the next morning, Birdie and Jim Ed and Norma told him to be sure and come back soon.

  Even after Brownie's old sedan had gone across the bridge and around the bend, back into the forest and away from them, it felt to each of the Browns as if he had not left at all, and that they could be assured, always, of his coming back. Even Maxine felt it, and though his arrival had meant a gap needed to be created elsewhere in her—the space that would have to be vacated by Elvis—she understood it was inevitable, and saw instantly how Brownie fit Bonnie's world, and precisely why there was no contest for her little sister's heart. He was not rich but he was thoughtful. He was a master at occupying the quiet spaces between spaces, and the spaces between things and events. Of course he was the thing that had been missing from Bonnie's life, maybe from all of their lives. Maxine saw that now, though still she mourned Elvis, mourned the loss of her friend, who—she understood this now—might well have been born lost.

  It wasn't fair. Brownie didn't even know anything about music, and didn't care—though here, too, Maxine had to admit to the perfection of her sister's find. He would heal whatever their music couldn't reach. In barely even being able to hear her music, he would serve as a sanctuary, an oasis of downtime from that stress. A secret life: her daring little sister.

  He would create a place in both their lives where—amazingly—neither of them would have any need for music. It wasn't fair, and again Maxine felt a colossal regret and resentment that she should have to be the pioneer, going forward first and making all the mistakes, so that her younger brother and sister might then benefit from those mistakes, and those hard corrections.

  In a little more than a year, Bonnie and Brownie would be married, and in nine months beyond that, their first child would be born. So much was moving now, beyond Maxine's ability to control or even change. It didn't make sense to her, how when she was young, she had had the ability to control or influence things—while at the peak of her career, every little thing seemed suddenly to be receding from her reach.

  She had no proof of such a thing, it was just a suspicion, an intuition—but the more she fretted about it, the more she saw it, that her flame was burning out, the world had used her up and was done with her. She was twenty-nine.

  ANOTHER BOAT RIDE

  BIRDIE HAD RESURRECTED the Trio Club, was running it by herself, still working herself to death—the Browns simply couldn't keep her from working—and finally, for the first time, Birdie appeared to be capable of knowing prolonged sorrow herself, following Floyd's death. These complications the evidence that no one spirit exists bright and separate from all the others around.

  Like the ghost the world had called for him to be now, Elvis had come back to see Bonnie as if trying to rescue himself: returning like a sleepwalker, an imposter of the young man he had once been, and been to her. He didn't even look quite the same; already, the edges were beginning to blur. He was a little looser, a little wilder, and though anyone who had not known him before would have described him as happy, the Browns could see that he was worse. That something larger than even his own spirit had gripped him—had captured his fear and made it large.

  He and Bonnie went canoeing on Poplar Creek one last time. By that time Bonnie knew it was the last time, but Elvis did not yet. It was springtime again and they picked wildflowers to place on Floyd's grave, which was on a hill overlooking the woods where Floyd and Jim Ed had hunted, with the creek visible in patches and shining puzzle pieces. It was the breakup, but they each treated it with a calm dignity, and prepared for it no differently than they had during the courtship and love's ascendancy. They took a hamper of Birdie's cooking—a dewberry pie, fried chicken and potato salad, cornbread, hard-boiled eggs—and a blanket and their guitars. He had always had an appetite, but by that time he was insatiable; before the day was half over, he had eaten everything in the picnic basket, a whole hamper's worth.

  They didn't talk much, but neither did they attempt to fill the silences with hollow chatter about touring. Instead, they just drifted down the creek. The clunk of the paddl
e against the gunwale as Elvis stirred the slow brown water. Bonnie sat in the bow, facing him. Smiling, but nervous. The one thing he could not bear, the idea of not being loved enough.

  She had made up her mind, and knew now what she wanted, and knew how to get there, and that Elvis was in the way, that she had to go over the top of him. Sometimes her hands trembled in between paddle strokes.

  The slight V of the wake as the boat moved quietly down the slow waters. They each knew what was happening but had no idea why. There were moments like this for them sometimes when they were onstage, moments when all they meant to be doing was playing, singing their hearts out, but then something happened: moments when they caught and owned the hearts of their audience, as if through some alchemy of shared emotions, some strange resonance of spirit, so much so that not only did the audience find itself inhabiting their sound, but was waiting on and wanting more, needing more—desperate to hear the next sound, the next swoop.

  Sometimes the moments elicited a roar from the audience; other times, a pin-drop silence. Either way, those moments were always fraught with enormous power—a power that seemed somehow even larger for having emerged from the paradox of the performers simply having wanted to have a good time. And there on Poplar Creek, on the day of their breakup—his banishment—there was in their quiet drift that same presence of almost intolerable meaning: the power of each ticking moment both agonizing and exhilarating.

  It started out all right; for a little while they were able to dance around it. Elvis in particular was gifted at such evasion, while it was more of Bonnie's nature to push ahead and give herself over to that moment of power; to give the audience more of whatever it was they had decided they wanted.

  Still, in the beginning, she could tell how frightened and uneasy he was, and gave him some space to simply paddle, and fidget. It was sad, having to ride quietly and wait for that nearing moment, and she tried to concentrate on Brownie. It was as if she could see two lives, two paths—one if she chose Elvis, and one if she chose Brownie—and she could see clearly now that the distance between those two paths was exactly the measure of Elvis's hunger. Not the old Elvis, but the new one. She had to save herself, but it was more than that: she loved Brownie.

  She had not told him about Brownie, and saw no need to. I would be breaking up with him even if I had not met Brownie, she told herself, and she believed that.

  They stopped and picnicked in the same place they always had, a dazzling white sandbar at the edge of the deep green woods. There was an old driftwood spar that they leaned their backs against, and they stretched their pale legs and bare feet out and ate the fried chicken like royalty, a king and queen liberated. Birdie, who knew what was coming, had packed simple cloth napkins, and when they were done, they wiped their hands on them and then undressed and went into the creek to bathe further.

  Even Elvis began to understand what was coming. After they came back out of the creek, water running off of them as if streaming from horses, they lay down and made love on the damp firm-packed sand at water's edge where there was no grit. Bonnie found herself crying and trying to hide her tears from Elvis, wanting him to know at least a few more minutes of peace, or delusion. Even a few more seconds. She was turned away from him but when some of her tears landed on his wrist, he knew they were not from the wetness of her hair. They felt as hot as melted mercury, and though he knew in that instant all that which he had already known but had been trying to keep suppressed, he still could not help but continue to pretend otherwise.

  "What is it?" he said. "What?" He turned her to face him, sought desperately for clues of how he might smooth back over this disturbance. Bonnie shook her head, crying harder, and there was no going back now; things were different, and beyond them the lazy current kept spooling past, with them no longer on it. Elvis had the irrational thought that if they were still out in that current, still in their boat—if they had not come in to shore—things could still have turned out differently.

  "What is it, baby?" he asked. "We can fix it," he said, betraying only now his own knowledge and understanding of all that lay below them. "We can make it right, baby," he said. "I know things have been crazy." Such was his confidence that he never even thought to ask if there was someone else. It wasn't so much arrogance as simply nothing that fit in his reality, and further evidence of the abyss between the two paths. "Just crazy," he said, "but all that will blow over." And she felt it then, felt it like a click so pronounced, it seemed almost audible: the resetting of things back to how they had been, his last-gasp effort to step back and become again who he had once been.

  It was dizzying; it felt to both of them as if he were crossing a fast river and had reached the middle and paused, was standing on a wobbly, slippery stone, but that for a moment—in that stepping-back—he was safe.

  He was holding on to her, too, was what it felt like—holding on to how they had been—and Bonnie was seized with the desperate desire to pry his death grip loose even as her own old self remembered the pleasure—not joy, but pleasure—of that grip.

  The confessions poured out of him now, from the refuge of that middle spot: how he needed her, how she was the only one he felt he could still be himself around, how he wanted to marry her, how life wouldn't be any good without her in it...

  She had ducked her head, was crying again, but there was certainly no testimony that could be offered that would alter the vision she understood to be true—the awful distance he had traveled already and the trajectory and momentum that was taking him still farther away. There could be no negotiation on this, and to some extent, she, unlike him, had already been doing her grieving. The guilt-twined combination of grieving and exultation.

  The ragged dance of such leave-taking; now it was her turn to shake her head and draw away from the density of the thing between them, while for only the first time now he sought to address it, and so much too late. She was annoyed with herself for the way the sound of his voice resurrected old hopes, old pleasures.

  "Let's paddle," she said, suddenly eager to leave the beach—understanding at some level that motion would help soothe him, would begin in some way the sealing-over process of healing—and so somewhat sullenly, he got up and began gathering their picnic items, and doing the emotional math for the first time, which of the two ways he wanted go.

  All his life, so many of his decisions seemed to have been made for him as if by fate, simply by following the paths of impulse or opportunity. This seemed entirely different: it seemed to require a calculation as prodigious as were the consequences risky—fame or happiness?—though even by the act of considering the two, the answer had already been reached.

  So they pulled back for a while, each into a place of hurt, seeking some protection in that new distance. Elvis paddled sometimes with irritation or frustration, other times with despair—and for a while they pretended a decision had not been reached. They didn't even so much smooth it over as seal it off for a little while; and as they resumed their drift, it felt to Bonnie as if she had to paddle to catch up with a new segment of life that had flowed past during the time they had lain there on the beach, while to Elvis it seemed as if they should not have left the beach, or that something had been left there—something he had forgotten and wanted back but would not be able to find again.

  At least they were not quarreling. They never had, nor would they. The closest they came was later in the afternoon, when—still trying to keep at bay the unpleasantness of the disagreement of the breakup—they pulled into an eddy and baited their cane poles with worms, feeling that since they had brought the poles, they should use them.

  They fished in silence, pretending to concentrate, for nearly an hour, the heat sending slow trickles of sweat down their backs. They sat as motionless as was possible to keep from spooking any drifting-by or hanging-around fish, and Bonnie's face was partially hidden in the shadow cast by her wide straw hat, and, as ever, she was more patient. Elvis swatted at a gnat, caught it and crushed it, t
ossed it onto the water's surface, where no fish rose to examine it.

  "Too hot for the fish to bite," he said—in his heart, thinking, Next time we come it will be better, a lump in his throat, a burning in his chest—and Bonnie said quietly, "Fish deeper."

  "Nah," he said—be damned if he would let a girl tell him how to fish, never mind that it was her home creek—and he stilled his fidgeting, stared more intently at his red and white bobber, willing a fish to take the worm, and not just any fish, but a big one. Telling himself that he would not leave until that happened, and willing it to be a fish of such immensity that Bonnie would laugh and scream, that it would be something she'd remember always, and that the excitement of the catch would cause her to rethink things, and to change her mind.

  That if the fish was large enough, they could somehow go back to where they had always been before.

  Bonnie was hot and getting hotter. Her line was still in the water, and from all outward appearances she was still focusing on waiting for a fish, but in her mind she had stopped fishing, was hoping she would not catch a fish, and was already looking ahead to the business of getting on with her future—of beginning to heal up over the heartbreak and continuing on with her life, and still feeling that strange and uncomfortable sensation that she needed to catch up with something that had passed her by while she had waited there on the beach.