by Rick Bass
Elvis's bobber went under: dipped twice, then plunged deep, and he shouted, gave a yank on his pole and set the hook, and shouted again as the line sawed back and forth through the water with the unseen treasure bolting.
In that moment, he felt the old pure joy of who he had once been—who he still was, barely—rushing through him with the hope and confidence that disaster had been averted.
It wasn't a big fish, though. When he hoisted it from the water, he and Bonnie both saw that it was barely eating-size. It was right at the cusp of the size where if an angler was hungry he or she would keep the fish, though it would not make much of a meal—would not even satisfy a child's appetite—or the angler could toss the fish back, saving the trouble of having to clean it, and could feel slightly virtuous.
Elvis wanted to keep the fish—he believed that his only chance of having her remain, the only indication that she might be willing to reconsider and to remember and appreciate their love and not relinquish it, would be if she agreed to keep the middling fish, as they had done so many times before.
"Well, chum," Elvis said, speaking to the potbellied little fish as it swung at the end of his line, "we've seen bigger, but you'll do. Maybe we'll catch a few more of your friends."
"Oh, Elvis," Bonnie said, "he's too small. Let's throw him back. Let's let him live."
Elvis huffed up, looked at her as if he had never even considered such a thing and couldn't understand why she would even suggest it. "He's eating-size," he lied. "Not by much, but he'll do. I'm hungry," he lied again. His heart thrashing and darting. He was still holding the cane pole aloft, the little fish was still twisting on the line, awaiting its fate—gold-rimmed eyes wide, gills working hard in the bright air—and Elvis, in the first concession to loss, dipped the fish back down in the water just long enough to wet it, then lifted it back out. As if upon its reemergence it might somehow appear larger.
He pulled the line in then and unhooked the fish, as he had done thousands of times before. The long bronzed hook, the fragment of pale earthworm still attached, shoved up to the shank.
"Please let him go," Bonnie said. "Please throw him back." But Elvis whacked the fish hard against the side of the boat, intending to kill it, but only stunning it. The fish quivered, then recovered and resumed its thrashing.
Bonnie began to cry again, and Elvis immediately lost all heart and said, "Look, honey," and tossed the fish back into the creek—it shuddered off, inky black, back down into the deeper brown waters, where it might one day grow to be a giant, shunning all hooks and the overhead passing of boats' bellies, blocking out the sun—but it was too late: Bonnie's shoulders were shaking, and when he scooted forward in the canoe and tried to console her, she shrugged off his touch and hissed, "Don't."
In a way it was the kindest thing he could have done, making it easier for her. Perhaps there was even some kindness in him, some instinct, that had known that, or perhaps it was the world's instinct; whatever the reason, both of their injured hearts began the hard process of turning away and drying up, the first layer of desiccation wrinkling the surface.
They paddled on downstream in silence, both with something new in them that seemed like its own kind of fierceness, a thing that had not been in them before: a survivor's fierceness.
The afternoon was growing late; it would be almost dusk before they got to the take-out, and early dark before they got back home, and they paddled all the way to the bridge without speaking, instead concentrating only on the efficiency of their strokes so that they might get there sooner, and both furious that the beautiful thing had gone away, had been lost, let go.
There was a bonfire burning in the yard when they got back, and they came driving in slowly. They were speaking to each other now concerning only the most perfunctory of matters—who would put the picnic hamper away, did Elvis need help with the boat—and as they drew nearer they could see the figures of their family standing around the fire, could hear the music, the sound of their singing, and their hearts buckled but then grew harder, both as determined now to survive as they had been previously to love deeply. The swoop and swoon of the world, and Bonnie felt some small satisfaction that she might have caught back up with whatever had passed her by there on the beach earlier in the day, though the cloud of guilt was immense.
Elvis didn't stay the night, but left straight away, though with a hope that seemed so strange to him as to not even feel like it was quite his but coming from some further, other place. Bonnie, likewise, was plagued that night by the sound of his voice and the memory of pleasure— I could go back, she thought, I could still go back —but in the morning the sun was bright, and later that afternoon, there was another letter in the mailbox, and she moved on, further and deeper into the future.
THE MIDDLE YEARS
THERE IS A QUESTION Maxine has for herself, as she opens more boxes and vaults from that long spell when upon beholding the world beyond her she saw that the world was no longer looking at her, and in her panic at that observation, she failed to behold the world.
Her question has to do with fortune or luck—not fame, but simple luck. She and her siblings had so much of it in their early years. Did it go away, in that strange middle ground that she has trouble remembering, or was it still there, simply unnoticed by her, during that time of panic?
She thinks it went away. There had been hard times in their youth, but it seemed they got harder later in life, and that—despite what she had believed to the contrary—wealth had nothing to do with it, and neither did fame.
She expected and understood that she would one day lose Birdie, and Floyd, too; and she understood that she would miss Floyd, would even grieve him, despite or in some strange way perhaps because of his harshness and unpredictability, and his habit of pushing her hard, and of never believing that anything she ever did was quite good enough, even as he was thrilled by her, and their, fame.
The emptiness in her, after he died: it was good that was gone, but it was surprising how there was a part of her that was thrown off-balance by its absence. She had seen trees like that in the forest, a pine growing too close to an oak, each pressing against the other, so that what in some ways was initially a competition for water, light, and nutrients eventually ended up being a system of necessary support, with each of the two weakened trees helping hold up the other.
She lost Norma when Norma was only in her midfifties; the Browns' career was already long gone, with Norma never having done more than pinch-hit for Bonnie or Maxine at one show or another, on the increasingly frequent occasions when last-minute family duties had prevented Bonnie from being able to make a show, or when Maxine's dramas with Tommy flared up, or when Maxine had simply been drinking too much and was unable to perform.
It was a different sound with Norma, and though Norma's voice was the clearest and strongest of all of them, the sound of the four of them never really took off. Their voices had never had the chance, given their age differences growing up, to become the living, supple thing—almost like a single breath—that those of Maxine and Jim Ed and Bonnie had. Norma was technically perfect, but that was almost the problem. Even to a listener not gifted with the ability to parse out the individual tones and notes, it was evident there was a difference. The sound was pleasant and accomplished but not magical. It was mistake-free but flatter for its lack of necessary corrections. It ascended and descended with a thing like caution, and lacked the restless confidence of Bonnie's and Maxine's notes together.
It was too good, Maxine thinks, too smooth. So good that Norma didn't need the three of them to polish her sound—but in that isolation, that position of strength, there was less magic, and a little more of what was only a cool proficiency.
Norma alone among them had gone to music school, had studied diligently, honing her perfection, and was never interested in fame, but instead only in bettering herself and her talent. She had been a teenager when the Browns were at the peak of their fame and had dreamed about it then, had longed to join
in with her sisters and brother on the stage, but she insisted later in life that that yearning had gone away and that she had been utterly content with her life spent teaching middle school music—choir and band—in Indiana, at a small rural school on the outskirts of Bloomington.
Maxine had never quite believed Norma's protests of happiness or contentedness—why else had she gone to six years of music school, if not in an effort to catch up with, and join, her older, famous siblings?—and felt guilty sometimes for not having done more to help work Norma into the group, allowing her to join them in a quartet, later in life, at certain lesser venues where the standards were not as exacting, or letting Norma open for them, singing her beautiful solos.
It was just timing, just the sheer separation of years, that prevented them from all being closer, and they never really had the chance to live a life with her. They continued to think of her as the baby, long after she was no longer that, and even after she was gone, taken from them at fifty-eight by a massive heart attack, leaving a grieving husband and students in Indiana—half of her ashes scattered there, and half by the cabin at Poplar Creek—the Browns still had trouble thinking of her as anything but the baby, always waiting to join them but never able to. She left behind for her siblings a world of nieces and nephews, their photos taped to the Browns' refrigerator doors, but with the pictures increasingly a few years behind real time, until finally the children grew up, not really knowing their aunts and uncles and cousins, and the still greater distancing proceeded.
It wasn't what Birdie would have wanted, but there just wasn't time.
Why couldn't it have been different? Maxine wonders. Why couldn't Norma have been born closer in age? Why did she have to go off to Indiana and start a whole new life—why couldn't everything have stayed the way it was?
It simply couldn't, of course, but why did Maxine waste so much time hiding from what life had become once it turned sour? Wouldn't it have been better to experience the sour rather than walling it off and experiencing nothing at all? She wasn't there for Norma's passing, didn't write all the condolence letters she wanted to. What would Birdie, Queen of Family, say? Even Floyd would disapprove.
She wonders idly if there was some point in time at which everything began to turn inexorably and subtly from great to poor; if in the path of her life and their lives there was some precise switchplate that was activated, taking them off one path of wholeness and fullness and directing all of them down a lonely, splintering path toward failure and isolation.
What day, what event, what hour? She tries to remember the day they scattered Norma's ashes but isn't even sure she was there. The middle is so foggy; once the quick fame was gone, she lost her way entirely.
Was there one exact day when the fire went out and life changed over from wonder into a cold, long march? Where is the heat, where is the warmth, where is the recklessness they all once possessed, in a time when there was no envy or fear or longing? Is she imagining it, that she—they—had once had that, and walked away from it?
As much as she'd like to blame it on Tommy, she doesn't think that was it. She thinks the subtle flexure, the infinitesimal leave-taking—the whisper of betrayal, whisper of failure—must have come at some earlier point in her life.
There's nothing to be done about it now; no way to go so far back and fix or repair that mistake. She remembers how Chet, always concerned with their welfare, saw that in her instantly, the regret and guilt and fear that in stepping from one land to the next, she might not step forcefully enough and might fall through the cracks, ending up in neither land—abandoning home but missing great fame.
She remembers a late-night talk she and Chet had near the beginning of the middle part of her career, when she first suspected things might be changing. He would have known it long before she even suspected it, and would have been doing his level best to keep that slow creep of obscurity from happening; and he would have been working also to keep her from the terror of suspecting it.
They were recording an album—she can't remember which one—and they were staying at his home in the country. Bonnie and Jim Ed had already gone to bed after but a single nightcap, exhausted from the perfection that Chet had requested of them all day—but Maxine was still wanting to stay up and be kept company, still sipping from her shot glass and telling stories. She wanted to hear stories, too—but that evening Chet didn't want to talk about other musicians, or even the Brown trio and their sound, but instead wanted to visit about Maxine.
She remembers that he kept asking her, with real concern—with too much concern, she thought—how she was doing, how she was really doing. It was not his way to probe into their private lives—for all its intimacy, their relationship was about the music they shared and made together, with everything else being so secondary as to almost not even exist. But that one night he was not talking about music and kept asking her that same question—"How are you really doing?"—with a gentle insistence that told her that he cared, and that he did not want to let her off the hook this time with banter or more whiskey or stories.
She almost buckled. She almost told him. Her eyes watered, though she allowed no tears to spill over, and gradually the tears dried without falling. She didn't say she was fine—she wouldn't lie to Chet—but she wouldn't tell him the truth either. Better to keep it inside and burn it up in the slow smoldering, the incineration. She told him nothing, acknowledged no fear or weakness, and in so doing, fell ever deeper, tumbling.
She remembers how he kept pushing: the one and only time he ever attempted such ministrations. It made her eyes water again, remembering how close what he was saying was to the counsel or warning that Birdie had given her some years earlier. She had already begun to have her various illnesses by this time, but Chet wasn't so much worried about those—the hysterectomy, the appendectomy, the bleeding spleen, the bladder tumor—and instead was zeroing in on the critical thing, the way his genius (was it its own curse, like hers, or only a blessing?) allowed him to do.
"You know, Max," he said, "regret can eat you up worse than any cancer, can leave you riddled like a piece of Swiss cheese." He paused then, to ease the tension in the room—what exactly was he accusing her of?—and poured the tiniest bit of whiskey into a shot glass for himself, and gave her another splash.
He took a sip of his own, though he did not offer a toast, and she could see him pulling back, drawing inward, giving up, disappointed, even as she wanted him to ask her just one more time if everything was all right, and how she was really doing.
He was talking about music now, not about her. It was still her music he was talking about, but he wasn't speaking entirely to her. He might have been speaking to himself, or even to his God or the Muse that nurtured him yet kept him captive.
"You can hear that kind of regret in a song," he was saying. "It's one of the loneliest sounds there is. You can hear it like the wind whistling through an old board filled with holes. It's a different sound from longing or wanting. It's the loneliest sound there is, and it's not comfortable, listening to it. It's raw and cold and it needs adjusting, too." He took another small sip, finishing his glass. He was becoming almost clinical now, looking at her with not so much concern or even pity but instead just the old cool studiousness. The admiration, but maybe not love. Maybe a protective step back from that now.
"It's a tricky business," was all he said, and they never spoke of it again.
This is no good, she thinks, this damned downward spiral. Maybe there is a reason she can't remember the middle years; maybe it's a mercy. All right, then, she tells herself, what was the best day of your life? When, on the other side of the switchplate, did the best day of her life occur? Or if not the best day, then the day when she had begun to think of herself as selected or chosen, and in need of pursuing whatever the name of it was, the thing that still, even now, lies just a little farther on.
She's trying to remember a day without singing—a day before singing, when someone, or the world itself, might hav
e seen her or known her for anything other than her voice—but she can't; not even as a child. Her identity is her voice. Was her voice. Not even her fame is her identity, but before that, her voice. How in the world can she ever possibly expect to get back to that? What a miracle that it ever was once that way.
There was almost such a day. There was part of such a day. She had been six—was already a singer, and loved it, but still possessed a freedom, was not yet owned by it but simply still in partnership with it. She had been able to walk toward it and yet able to walk away.
It was late October, her favorite time of year. She had started school; there was that wonder and newness to deal with, though Jim Ed and Bonnie had not yet begun, and so there was an extra freedom, an extra bit of the pioneering spirit she always carried. She was coming home from school; the school bus, a marvelous adventure, more luxurious to her then than any limousine she would ever ride in subsequently, dropped her off every day at the end of the county road, still a mile from home. There was certainly no gas to be wasted by having a car meet her at the end of the road, nor was there time in either Birdie's or Floyd's schedule for that extravagance. Birdie had met her at the top of the road the first day and had walked back with her, asking how her day had gone and making sure that Maxine remembered the way home, but after that, the journey had been all Maxine's.
It was only a thirty-minute walk—forty if she dawdled—but it was all hers, the first time in her life she had had such space and time to herself, with neither the obligation of watching after or caring for Jim Ed and Bonnie. Sometimes she would hum and sing on her walks home, other times not. The best part was always after the long bus had made its groaning big turn and headed back away from her and she was left there, standing alone, as if on a stage. It's hard for her to remember now the girl who had thought that was such a treasure, such a treat.
