by Rick Bass
Radio would soon be completely secondary to television in its ability to grip men and women's souls and hold them fixed and captive to whatever message was being delivered, and country music would soon become a distant second to rock-and-roll. One man, their friend, would see to that—he had found his path and was hurrying toward it. The Browns were growing older, too, aged by the road—Maxine was nearing thirty-two!—but most damning of all to their engagement with fame, the country was beginning to awaken from its self-willed trance, was beginning to stir to a boil. The country didn't want to sleep any longer.
Still, just before sleep went away, there was fame. They were still churning out hits: everything they put out went to gold or almost gold, and then silver, and then almost silver, and so on. They were sinking but pretended not to know it. Bonnie was as secretly delighted by the sensation of sinking as Maxine was terrified.
Always, they were just one big song away from recovery.
The record companies, which were all venturing into television now, were awash with advertising money, and were forever throwing release parties, as were the powerful radio stations, owners of the sky itself, with each independent disc jockey determining who received airtime and who didn't.
There was booze at the parties, and not only had Maxine become practiced at drinking a lot, she was becoming accustomed to tossing her drinks in other people's faces at even the slightest provocation. It was something a woman could do to a man to signify to everyone else at the party that the man had been disrespectful, boorish, even insulting, and Maxine wasn't shy about slinging the sticky liquor in anyone's face, might even by this time have been looking for opportunities to do so. Steaming receptions in little cinder-block low-wattage radio stations, attended mostly by men but also by a few women, and the scent of spilled alcohol rife in the small rooms from such tossings, and innocent bystanders sometimes catching the brunt of her rage, men's jackets and shirtfronts dashed with it, the scent of aged cigarette smoke cloaking the linings of their throats and burrowing into their lungs.
Bonnie wanted out. She had Brownie at home and two little daughters now. One of her smaller pastures was bounded by stone walls, and chickens ranged freely in the yard. Blue smoke curled from her chimney in the fall and winter, and on her drive back home each time, she would see neighbor women out in their gardens, weeding or harvesting, or out in the verdant fields of springtime, walking through the pastures with battered metal feed buckets in their hands, dairy cattle following close behind. Giant sheaf-stacked mountains of hay gleamed and glinted in the sun in the middle of such pastures, casting smooth, rounded shadows.
Maxine missed her children, too, but not like Bonnie. There is no right or wrong to greatness—there is only the forward movement of it, and those who possess the most of it are the least in control of it.
Chet Atkins avoided such parties like the plague. He didn't judge anyone who attended them, but he stayed home, guarded his time, worked in his studio, played music quietly by himself, or hung out with his family. Far down in Maxine's treasure chest, there is a photo of Chet Atkins from around the time of the Browns' incandescent ascent. He is sitting in the control room on one side of the soundproof glass, a cup of coffee at his side, and is staring across at the Browns, who are in the midst of a recording session. The three Browns are gathered around the mike, leaning in and hitting their note, their faces pure and clean and illuminated in that moment, caught perfectly in the space of what the world most wants them to do.
Atkins is back in the shadows. Countless times he had been over on the other side of that glass, playing, but in this photo he is recording, and the look on his face, which some might describe as simply attentive, is so much more than that.
It is the look of a man who has captured something he cares deeply about—there is almost guilt in his expression, at witnessing the object of his affection and admiration. It is an image of one of the rarest yet most natural things in the world, greatness attracted to greatness, greatness coming in contact with greatness.
Jim Reeves went down in a plane crash. He should have known better. Maxine is still angry about it, half a century later. He should have done the math, should have counted how many stars back then had plane crashes—a reverse kind of effluorescing, sparks rising but then tumbling.
He had gotten his pilot's license and his own little plane. Maxine was supposed to have gone up with him that day. He had been badgering her to go over to Arkansas with him to look at some property he wanted to buy for an investment. They were going to stay for the weekend. They weren't romantically involved—he was still married to Mary—he just wanted some company with one of his old touring partners. Maxine had plenty of spare time by that point; they both did. She had even found a babysitter.
She was all set to go, and then at the last second, she wouldn't: Alicia got sick. Jim Reeves tried to get her to go anyway, said to bring Alicia and they'd find a doctor up in Arkansas. He was all but summoning her, with the greatest urgency he was capable of, but in the end, she hesitated, anchored by a stronger force. It wasn't her time yet. She wanted to go, but didn't. She stayed home and took her child to the doctor.
Alicia was better the next day, and Maxine, Jim Ed, and Bonnie got in the car the day after that and headed out to Dallas, where they had gotten an increasingly rare gig to appear on The Big D Jamboree. They were driving through the middle of the night—it was cooler that way—and they always tried to wait to leave until after the children had fallen asleep. They were driving and listening to The Ralph Emery Show out of Baton Rouge when Ralph Emery came on the air between songs and said that there was sad news in the world of country music, that another great musician's plane was missing and presumed to have crashed.
They all three fell silent. Jim Ed was driving, and all they could hear was the wind coming in through the open windows. They had already completely forgotten about Jim Reeves going up to Arkansas. He just wasn't on their mind that way, but then Ralph Emery started playing a song of Jim's, "Night Rider," and they knew.
Jim Ed pulled over to the side of the road. All three of them were weeping. There wasn't any other traffic out. They got out of the car and collapsed against one another there on the shoulder of the road, gravel on their knees, the stars bright around them, moths swarming the headlights, and the crickets still chirping like nothing had happened.
The radio said they hadn't found his plane. They held out a little hope. In their hearts they knew he was gone, but they pretended he wasn't. They didn't know whether to push on or turn around and go back home. They drove through the night to Dallas, crying, while the radio played Jim's songs all night. They got almost all the way to Dallas by daylight, checked in at a little hotel just outside the city limits, and slept until about noon, then got up and went in to the coliseum to dress and rehearse.
No one had heard anything yet and everybody was asking if the plane had been found.
When Maxine remembers that time, she doesn't know why they went ahead and did the show. It was just a stupid show. There was some discussion among the three of them, and a phone call to Mary, that maybe it was what Jim would have wanted them to do. It certainly wasn't any fun, and though they sounded all right and got another standing ovation, and everyone was glad they were there to worry together, the Browns just wanted to get back home. They finished the show and drove all the way back to Nashville that same night. They got there at daylight and all went up in the hills with the volunteers who were looking for his plane.
Someone found it that day at noon. It had crashed on approach in a thunderstorm, had gone down only a mile from Jim Ed's house. That part really bothered them, wondering if he'd known where he was and was trying to bring it down close to someplace where he might be able to get help. Gone forever, at the age of forty-one. It had seemed old to them, back then.
It just got harder to keep going after that. Mary Reeves became unhinged. She cut off all contact with her friends and moved out to the desert in New Mexico, where she
kept an increasing number of cats for companionship, trying to halt her slide, but there could be no halting it: they had all risen too far too fast and now had to pay the price in the falling, while the rest of the country listened to the steady, smooth crooning music and never knew a thing, never dreamed of either the ecstasy or the agony.
The life in the desert didn't heal her—the searing heat and light might have bought her some time, but it didn't heal her. She ended up needing help in an assisted living facility, a sanatorium, that tended to her basic daily needs.
It all went by pretty quick, Maxine thinks, and wonders for the ten thousandth time why she alone was left, and why she has traveled the journey unharmed and untouched. I am unharmed, she thinks. I have remained untouched.
HOLES
SHE HAS A THREE-DAY wait before Jefferson Eads returns. She's been on the phone with Bonnie and has left messages for Jim Ed, who's out on the road. Bonnie is mildly interested, though when Maxine describes the filmmaker as a nice young man, Bonnie's thinking grad school or maybe even a little older. Bonnie doesn't volunteer to come down; it's midsummer, the height of gardening season.
Jefferson Eads is all business when he returns, no chitchat—he doesn't want to sit and have any tea with her, though he does eat a couple of the cookies. Maxine's a little disappointed by how antisocial he is—how driven, almost brusque—but she quickly adapts her mood to his: business.
He has a little notepad on which he's sketched various scenes—places he wants her to be, things he wants her to be doing. She's not a gardener, but he wants footage of her digging a hole in the backyard, and is almost cross with her when he discovers that she doesn't even own a shovel. He won't take no for an answer, and he leaves her there in the kitchen with her tea and a plateful of cookies and hurries next door to the neighbors, whose names Maxine can't quite remember, and returns shortly with the prop he needs.
He works her hard that morning, using up all the good in her and then some, positioning her just so against the morning light, then repositioning her, and yet again: forcing her to walk back and forth, doing the same minor take over and over again, neither praising nor criticizing her, simply directing her to repeat the same thing with only the most minor of variations, and with Maxine wearing down quickly.
None of this is what I signed on for, she thinks. Be careful what you ask for. But time and again she answers the bell and does whatever he asks with as much energy as she can bring.
"Why would an old woman with a walker be out digging a hole?" she asks him at one point—the late-morning sun is above the trees, beating down hard, stirring the floaters in her vision—and Jefferson Eads does not have an answer, but pushes her to do it again, though he gives her a break, lets her hobble over to the shade and sit down in a folding chair to catch her breath while he pans the camera all around the yard, filming what now looks like a battlefield for gophers.
"This was not in my life," she says, and he sighs and tells her that it's important to him, it's what the film books call metaphor, though when she asks him for what, he purses his lips and says, "We'll have to see."
"It's my life," she says, "and my movie, I deserve to know."
Jefferson Eads shrugs and tells her he can't explain it, that he works by instinct. "You're hungry," he says, "you're desperate. You're clawing at the earth. That's all I know. That's all I need to know."
Sensing that he's losing her—and he's cross about this, too—he calls it a day, tells her she can go back inside and have a glass of water.
And once inside, his demeanor changes, as if he's suddenly sated. He becomes a young boy again rather than a tyrant, and where previously he was interested in only the camera and the cold technical impassivity of light and sound, he is now interested in her life again. The camera's rolling again—the camera's always rolling—but he's not being so dictatorial; he's just a boy again, curious about the treasure of her life, and is drawn to her, like so many before him.
All she ever had to do was wait: everything came to her, always, and she had only to wish for something and it would eventually be given to her. The only flaw in the miracle was that it was never enough.
"M-O-N-E-Y"
THE DIRT-POOR hardscrabble life of chronic poverty had not been hard. Seeing her audience slip away was what was hard.
The greatness wasn't leaving her. Maybe if it had, the slipping-away of audiences would have been easier to tolerate, would have been less lonely. It would have been a bitter loss, but one that she thinks she could have managed. But what gravels her is that the greatness didn't leave.
It left Elvis. They went up and saw him once, after his peak but before his decline. It was 1970, a full decade after their own glory days.
Despite still being atop his own summit, Elvis knew something was wrong, and was quiet and somber, lonely, barely recognizable in spirit from the young man they had known only ten years earlier. He was the opposite of the Browns now: the greatness had left him, but not the audiences. If Maxine had looked more closely she would have seen that that was even lonelier than her own condition.
After years of silence, he called for them, not by phone, as he had in the past, but via the mail. He had a secretary but had not used her, had written the note himself: Please come and visit. He had sent it to the only address he knew, the old one, where it sat unclaimed in their mailbox for months until Jim Ed had been back home during hunting season. The young trees growing up around the sawmill now were already almost thick enough to make into lumber.
Jim Ed stayed a week, hunting by himself and camping in the old house of his childhood, sleeping on the floor next to the woodstove, lulled by the popping of the coals, and surrounded by all the old ghosts. When he arose early to make coffee, it seemed that they were all there with him, still sleeping, and each morning he walked down into the woods and into the darkness, where he sat in his tree stand quietly and watched the sun come up, and was amazed by how fast the world kept moving, whether he was in the center of it or not.
At the end of his week, feeling strong and rested, he went back to his home in Nashville, called Bonnie, who said, "Why not?" and then Maxine, who said, "Maybe he wants to do a special album with us."
Jim Ed shook his head. "I think he's just lonely, Max," he said. "He said he just wants to see us. It's not about music at all," he said, "it's just about us."
Maxine paused, absorbing the disappointment. "Well, let's go anyway," she said.
He had offered to send a car and driver—Jim Ed had winced, remembering the time Floyd had loaned his car to Elvis, and once again felt surrounded by the ghosts—and he told Elvis thanks but that they would just drive over in Jim Ed's car.
"It's a big place," Elvis said. "You can't miss it." Jim Ed laughed, thinking it was his old humor, but then was concerned when Elvis said, "What's so funny?"
Like a boy, he was waiting for them at the front gate when they drove up. His father, Vernon, was there with him, had been staying with him for about a month, and Elvis gave each of them a hug, a stage hug at first, but then it dissolved into something denser and more powerful, so that for them it felt as if they were each helping hold him up.
He spent a couple of hours showing the Browns all around: showing them this and that bedroom, bathroom, closet. Then they went back outside and walked around on the grounds for a long time. It was cold and windy, and the Browns couldn't remember ever having been to a lonelier or more unsettling place in all their lives.
They walked forever. Vernon walked with them, a skinny little old man, and at one point he took Bonnie aside and said he was sure sorry that Elvis and Bonnie didn't get married, that Elvis had told him that they were going to. Which was not the truth—she had never told him yes—but there was no need to tell Vernon that. "He's sure a sweet boy," she said instead, and Vernon said, "Yes, he is."
The Browns thought it was strange how he'd gone so long without seeing them or talking to them and then contacted them from out of the blue. At one point Maxine commented
on this, trying to break the strange awkwardness that seemed to be around them, and that she thought he might have had some kind of shared album in mind, but Elvis shook his head and said he just wanted to see them was all. He said he'd been hearing them on the radio now and again and thinking about them a lot, and that he missed them. He said he was pretty sad most of the time. He wanted something from them, but they couldn't tell what.
Vernon got cold and went back inside. The rest of them sat out on the hood of one of his cars—a gold Cadillac convertible—in that cold wind, and talked about the old days. He had on a big white coat with some kind of fur around the neck, so he was warm, but the rest of them were cold, and the hood of the car was cold. They didn't mention the incident with Floyd's Oldsmobile, and Elvis didn't bring it up either. They had no reason to believe he even remembered it.
He was so lost, Maxine recalls. The car was parked out on the lawn right by the front gate, and the Browns had to be leaving soon. They had no doubt that he wanted to leave with them, wanted to go back to the way things had been. That whole day, the only time he looked even remotely happy was when he told them about one of their past hits he'd been thinking about, a single called "M-O-N-E-Y." He said he couldn't get it out of his mind. He got real animated then, told them how he'd like to hear it played—how he'd like to play it, if it was his song—and he started tapping it out right there on the hood of the car, and singing it, and for that little bit, he was like the old Elvis again, and they had to say, he was right, the song sounded pretty good the way he was doing it.
