Nashville Chrome

by Rick Bass

  Jefferson doesn't understand it, but he's seen it before. He's filmed everything with his camera—friends, family, used car salesmen, school crossing guards, teachers, baseball coaches—and always they drop their guard after an initial period of defensiveness.

  It's as if they pass through a curtain, with the burden of maintaining artifice on one side and the freedom of living for oneself, without falsity or misrepresentation, on the other.

  Some of Jefferson's subjects pass through that curtain sooner than others, but they all pass through it. In a way that he does not understand, the camera helps them with this metamorphosis. Sometimes he's a little frightened by this power, and while he used to think that it resided solely in the camera, disappearing as soon as he turned the switch off and the battery's current drained to nothing, it has begun to seem to him recently that some of the power is developing in him as well, and he likes it.

  Maxine's guile, and Maxine's pique, are gone within fifteen minutes. It's simply too hard to maintain such things at her age, and with her so out of the habit of manipulation. She's been honest for far too long; one day after another of avoiding the bottle has turned her, for better or worse, into an honest person.

  That first day, Jefferson is able to pretty much film all that remains of her life, and in the span of only a couple of short hours. He films her watching the old movies that she pulls out to show him—she's chatty and even ebullient at first, glancing at his camera and smiling from time to time, though soon enough she passes through the veil and into a land of utter transparency, so that he is able to walk around her in that darkened room, filming from all angles and at all distances—moving in as close to her as an optometrist peering in to the optic nerve while the patient stares fixedly ahead, suspended in the darkness, lulled in a darkness that is made all the more absolute by the presence of that one beam of light and nothing else beyond.

  Soon she has lapsed into brooding hypnosis, watching her old films, and Jefferson gets that on tape, and records the silent movies themselves. He captures her solemn, watchful trance, which is punctuated by small moments of laughter—as if, though she's seen each tape thousands of times, the same reflexive trigger still works, time after time—and later, when she shows him the memorabilia room, he films her opening the cedar chest, and the cautious manner with which she unfolds each brittle section of newspaper, each poster, each trinket: the careful exhumations.

  He films the pictures on the wall. When she is finally done in that room—she stops at the doorway, looking back at it like a surveyor staring out at some vast territory—he follows her into the kitchen and films her shaky hands struggling to tear open a teabag wrapper. "Here, let me help you with that," he says, and sets the camera down where it can keep filming as he steps around and helps her.

  And though he doesn't so much feel compassion for her, or the embers of warmth that he knows should be associated with even so small an act of generosity, there is for him the tiny pleasure, tiny relief, of solving a technical problem: of smoothing over some ragged irregularity in the world, which his eyes are so adept at noticing. Maxine marvels at his youth, and the clean efficiency with which he tears open the square little colored envelope of the teabag.

  He withdraws from the frame once he has the teabag open. He's a little disoriented. He's not sure how he'll fit himself into her movie, or even if he will. Maybe his job is just to roll footage.

  He films her hurrying to the back door when Buddy comes trotting through on his way back home. Maxine opens the door and calls to him sweetly—Buddy lifts his head in casual acknowledgment but appears to make no move to come over and see her, is resolute in his routine of homeward bound—and Jefferson lowers his camera to ground level, films Buddy's dignified little trot. Then Buddy notices Jefferson and, as if perturbed or at least simply made curious by this variance in his world, barks once before trotting over to examine and meet the stranger.

  Buddy tries to be gruff—his hackles are raised—but he can't pull it off, he sniffs Jefferson and then, strangely, rubs up against him like a cat rather than the old dog he is.

  "Animals like me," Jefferson says, and for a moment his guard is down, he is just being a boy, and paying attention to Buddy so that he misses the look of complete envy and small pleasure and sharp little sorrow that passes over Maxine's face. The old jealousy, the old possessiveness. A bitter quick mix of My dog and Love me.

  Will it ever come back—the feeling of being noticed, and the certainty of being the star?

  Jefferson finishes one memory card on his camera and starts another. He sits at the table and interviews her, asks her questions about Elvis, and about the Beatles.

  He takes her oral transcript, her testimony, with tireless patience, interjecting himself only occasionally to ask for more information, inquiring about gone-by heroes and heroines of whom he, like almost everyone else in the world now, knows nothing. Who were Jim and Mary Reeves, what were they like, tell me more about them. What were your mother's favorite recipes, who was Chet Atkins, how did you feel when Jim Ed hurt his hand?

  He could stay all night. She could talk all night, but her energy level is flagging and he has told his parents he'll be back before dark. It's about a forty-five-minute walk, and he doesn't want them to have to come get him; he tells Maxine he likes the independence of being able to come and go on his own.

  Neither of them is a particularly warm-hearted individual, but as he's leaving, she leans in to give him a small, loose hug, as if it's something she's learned to do from an instruction manual, and he turns and readjusts the camera strap on his shoulder to better allow her to do so, as if he perhaps has read the same manual, with its instructions on how to receive such a stiff and awkward embrace; though as ever, he keeps the camera rolling and is still recording even as he walks down her steps, walking slowly backwards and filming her waving goodbye.

  She's so excited, he thinks. And as he has so many times before, he wishes he could feel a little more warmth—that swooning, lilting softness that he's seen inhabit others—but that particular fire is not in him right now. He waits patiently for it and thinks that someday it will be in him—but instead, his fire and attention are focused on the film he's just captured, and as he walks back home, he plays it over and over in his mind, unstacks and reassembles different sequences, and is becalmed, soothed and strengthened by this exercise of bringing precise and attractive order to the quick crumbling of her life.

  And after he is gone—after Maxine has gone back inside, aflame with hope and a depth of joy she does not recall having experienced for many years, a feeling that strikes her in an odd way as being dangerously close to the highs she would sometimes experience when drinking—she goes into the kitchen and sits down and sips from a glass of water. And then, certain that she is all alone, she clears her voice and begins to sing.

  THIRD CHILD

  IT WASN'T EASY when she filed for the divorce; as an attorney, Tommy made sure of that. Maxine was just glad that Floyd wasn't alive to criticize her for it, and her one regret about all of it was that Birdie had to know. The shame of failure was a thing she absolutely could not abide, but neither could she carry the burden of her mistake, made so long ago, any further forward. Stubbornness alone had taken her this far, but she could not go another day. He was flaunting his affairs now, and, having finally noticed the ineffable decline of her stardust—noticing it not in the abstraction of vaguely diminished fervor among her audiences, for he never attended her shows, but instead through the steady reduction in the already modest royalty checks—Tommy began to mock her, calling her the worst thing anyone could, a has-been, telling her it was all over.

  It was strange, she thought, after she had driven to the next small town, Gethsemane, and gotten help from an attorney in filling out the papers. The sheaf of them in a manila folder, resting on her bureau in the spring sunlight that afternoon, after she had gone back home to pick the children up from school. The attorney in Gethsemane had counseled her to wait a
full twenty-four hours before filing and to talk to Tommy one last time. The attorney was not so concerned that the marriage was ending as instead how much harder life was about to become for Maxine financially.

  After dreading it and fighting it for so long, she was surprised by the new feeling of peace, looking at the big envelope there on her dresser. It felt like the first time in a long time that she had been able to control something in her life—and while it occurred to her that this was the time of day when she sometimes liked to pour a glass of wine, she instead just sat here, in the privacy of her bedroom, listening to the shouts and cries of the children playing outside, and she watched the sunlight on the envelope, and marveled at how good it felt to be starting over.

  ***

  She was nervous that night when Tommy came home for dinner. There were many nights when he did not come home, and she had hoped that this would be one, but as if he existed now only to plague her, he came home before dark and spent some time in the front yard playing with the children. Maxine was jittery, wondering if he knew, but he said next to nothing, so that all seemed as it always did, detached and isolate. They ate dinner and put the children to bed and poured nightcaps and then went to bed themselves, and when Tommy moved in close to her and began to put his hands on her, she pushed them away and said, No, not tonight.

  She felt his stillness, then felt him turning away, and once again, though in a smaller dose, she felt a whiff of that peace she had inhabited so deeply earlier in the day, and she smiled, then fell asleep, and slept all through the night, uninterrupted by even the industry of dreams.

  She had a doctor's appointment the next day after dropping the children off at school, and feeling absolutely giddy—how different the world looked now that it had been returned to her, now that she had gone and gotten it back—she sat in the waiting room. Her next stop would be the courthouse.

  The doctor asked if she wanted to take a pregnancy test, and she almost laughed and said it wasn't necessary, but stopped with a hitch in her heart, and the more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that she was pregnant, to the point where she didn't want to take the test.

  He finished his exam, declared her fit as a fiddle—said nothing about her smoking or drinking—and she was about to leave, was about to turn her back on and move away from her fear, but then stopped and turned and went back.

  "Maybe I should take that test after all," she said.

  She held on to the divorce papers for another five years. She finally had them redrafted and filed when the third child, Jimmy—little Jimmy Brown, just like in the song that had first brought them fame, so long ago—was four. She took the papers back home as before, but this time did not wait the full twenty-four hours suggested, and neither did she feel the incredible peace of relief that had attended her first attempt.

  Tommy moved out, but nothing really changed or got better; things were just a little harder, was all. Sometimes she would get a neighbor girl to help with the children, and other times she would take them down to Birdie's, though Birdie was aging hard now, was having trouble getting up and down from a chair—her knees and ankles were always swollen and she lost her breath easily—and there was far less money. And where previously in town there had been looks of judgment and pity from those who knew of Tommy and his ways—which was to say, everyone—there were now looks that accused her of not trying harder, or of being a bad mother, swell-headed with fame or simply a poor and unobservant judge of character for choosing Tommy in the first place. As if she had somehow deserved such misery and had set out to procure it.

  LEAVING

  BONNIE AND BROWNIE had bought a farm in the Ozarks. The clock was ticking now: Bonnie was renouncing the magic, was choosing a life, while Maxine chose the other thing, the heartbreak of immortality and the bitterness of pursuing it, always one full day behind it.

  It was easier for Bonnie to step away from it all and choose a life on the farm with her new family, when she was still young and strong and beautiful. Bonnie would have known in some abstract fashion that she and Brownie would grow older and would eventually someday cross a threshold where forever after there was only accruing diminishment—that each day would become more and more difficult—but back then, that knowledge would have had no bite. The words deaf and weak-sighted and stoved-up would have had no currency in youth; the terms feeble and confused and arthritis were just nouns and adjectives, small foreign coins that could not be spent in the land they inhabited. It was an easier choice, back then, trading fame for Brownie.

  The thing about Bonnie is that even now, with her markers coming due, she is happy, and better than happy—content—with her choice. She made the right choice. She got lucky.

  All the way through, Bonnie's separation from Elvis remained amicable, and came quickly to resemble something more brotherly—as if at heart he had always been but another Brown sibling. He came to see Bonnie late one night just before her wedding, after having been out of touch with all of them for several months, and had a long heart-to-heart talk—in essence, acknowledging that she was right, that he had been gripped by something and carried away from who he was and where he had once been, acknowledging that he understood he would never be able to get back; but what he did not acknowledge was that he had taken something from her, from all of them, as he had traveled on past them.

  Only the deepest, furthest part of him understood that, a place so far within him that it would be a very long time before he understood more clearly what had happened—what they had given him and the world, and what he had taken.

  As it was, he stayed up near the surface, that night, with him and Bonnie sitting alone in Birdie's kitchen, crickets chirping slowly outside, and her upcoming new life about to open before her with every bit as much vigor as had all of her previous adventures. Her hard but blessed childhood. The sweet love with Elvis, and now this, a man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with: Why had life been so good to her? Why had she been chosen for such happiness?

  They talked on and on, sinking a little deeper into things as the night progressed, but in no way descending all the way to the murky bottom; that in his pursuit of being loved, he had almost been like a hunter—seeking, finding, then feasting on, their magic—and that night, Bonnie did not acknowledge or understand this either, or the guilt of knowing that at some level she had been willing to shed it. To transfer it—the blessing but also the curse.

  They talked above all that, never knowing, never understanding. They descended only a short distance, and talked, with great affection, about their hopes for each other. Eventually the conversation rounded a corner and came to the topic of Brownie, and here Bonnie had to ascend from even the modest depths they had been exploring, being careful and cautious now, navigating the conversation with adjusted attentiveness, a precise polish. The peacekeeper.

  No one in her family could have done what he or she did without the others. They were three parts of one voice, and for a little while, they were united in the desire to spill out onto the world and to change it before realizing that they each finally had to pull away. Bonnie realizing it before anyone. Of course she needed the calm, gentle, dependable doctor with her for such a bold and essentially defiant action—spurning fate itself, and winning. In this secret way mild Bonnie was perhaps the most daring of them all.

  Elvis fussed a little on the topic of Brownie, not so much in the hopes of ever getting her back—he had other business to tend to; he could see and understand that now—but hemming and hawing more out of concern for Bonnie, that she might be making a mistake, a choice that would impinge on the very thing he loved most about her, her happiness.

  "But sweetie," he protested, trying to articulate it, "I don't even know the dude."

  Her laughter, the trill of it—the pure peal—relaxed him and told him all he needed to know, that she really was in love, and that, just as important, it would last.

  The knowledge of what he had left behind, and of what he had taken,
would come to him slowly over the years, even as he became numbed, medicated, scarred over, detached and distanced from the brief wonder of life. Often, in recording sessions with his backup singers, the Jordanaires, an all-white chorus, he would feel that something was missing from his recording, something soulful and immense, and the older he got, the more he understood what it was.

  From behind the opiates and the booze he would order another take, and then another, would call out to the producer as well as to the Jordanaires, "Give me some of that Brown sound!"—but by that time no one ever understood what he was talking about, assumed instead he was talking about James Brown, and punched their vocals up in the other direction, making it more bluesy, more rock-and-roll.

  Fame still would not leave them entirely—was it gnawing on Maxine's misery, or was it attracted to Bonnie and her brilliant cheer? The year 1962 was the first in which they didn't have a number one hit, but they rebounded, had three the next year.

  Perhaps the fame was drawn equally to the movements—the peace as well as the agony—of the three of them. Perhaps it could not stay away. Everything beneath them was collapsing; they had thought they were standing on stone but it turned out to be sand, and now water was lapping at their feet.

  It was the same sand that had once been the tops of mountains, with not even a scar in the sky to mark where the mountains had been: sand being swept down Poplar Creek to Tishomingo Creek, where it would join with the larger Red Bluff Creek before being carried into the Mississippi—and Bonnie, with her new husband and new family, wanted out, while Maxine wanted to hold on even more fiercely, while Jim Ed didn't care one way or the other. He would be all right; all he needed was his deep voice.