Nashville Chrome

by Rick Bass

  The room filled steadily with the green flesh aroma of the split hulls, the fiber mushy sometimes beneath the shellers' thumbnails, and they all three worked in unified silence, lulled by the trance of the hunter-gatherer, proceeding moment by moment into the uncertain future, against which any stockpiling was always only a partial solution. The pleasure and gratification of ancient tasks.

  That night there was a summer storm, and each of them awakened to the sound of limbs and branches landing on the tin roof, followed by the shooting-gallery drum of hail. Bonnie got up and went out onto the porch, worried for her garden, but there was nothing to be done; she knew she would just have to wait for morning, and hope that the broad leaves of her plants and the care with which she spaced them would be sufficient to protect the underlying vegetables. Brownie came out onto the porch with her briefly to admire the lightning, put his arm around her, and told her it would be all right.

  "She wants to go back," Bonnie said, and Brownie nodded and said, "You had to know that she would." They stood there smelling the scent of fresh storm-clipped foliage—basil, tomatoes, parsley, dill—and with a tremble in her voice, Bonnie said, "I'm afraid it's going to be all ruined," but Brownie rubbed her back and said, "Nonsense, you've seen storms worse than this before. Don't worry," and then went back to bed, craving, as ever, sleep, working from a lifetime deficit he would never quite be able to catch up on.

  In her room, Maxine cursed the storm's sound and pulled the pillows over her head, and worried about her drive home. The power went out sometime after midnight, but by that time she was asleep again, dreaming that she was a child at home and that none of the fame had occurred yet and none of the unhappiness; and when she next awoke, the sun was up high. It was midmorning, Brownie was long gone, off to work, and the coffee brewed in the kitchen was already too strong to drink. She poured a glass of orange juice and went out into the garden, where Bonnie, who had been working since dawn, was just finishing the cleanup.

  Neat piles of leaves and limbs were stacked for burning, and Bonnie had gathered all of the shredded parts of her garden, had salvaged the vegetables that had been cut or clipped or partially bruised by the storm. There were still drifts of hail in the yard and in her garden, so that it looked as if she were working amid fields of snow, but the sun was melting those patches quickly and all the world was steaming; and despite being out in the hail, Bonnie was sweating.

  There was an electricity in the storm-scrubbed air, and Maxine was ready to walk to town if necessary to secure some vodka for the orange juice. The children were still sleeping, but she had to get on the road. She would ask the question, even knowing full well what the answer would be, and then she would leave and would try to figure something else out; though how she could push on without the other two parts of her sound, she had no idea, knew only that the orange juice tasted flat and unsubstantial.

  "I was thinking," she said, "what about a reduced schedule? Maybe just each spring," she said, and then, remembering the garden, "or each fall, once the children are back in school."

  "Maxine," Bonnie said, with a quick flame of anger that even now she regrets, "it's over." Bonnie was clutching a handful of plants that had been cut down by the storm, and her temper, her anger, seemed to her to be coming from the new-lashed soil itself. "We had more than our fair share," she said. "Nobody can take that away, but it's gone now. You go ahead and do what you want, but I'm done. I don't want any more to do with it. I want to remember it how it was.

  "Things end," Bonnie said. "You've got to stop clinging to it. You've got to find something else worthwhile in your life." She paused, knowing she had said enough, but it was like there was some kind of momentum now, in the opening-up, that wouldn't let her. "It's pathetic," she said. "Nobody wants to hear us anymore. I don't want to hear us anymore."

  Maxine just stood there as if cast to stone. The garden was sparkling again but the steam made it look like it was burning. She stared at her sister—her little sister, whom she had saved—and for a moment wanted to say I understand; and for a moment, feeling the whip of Bonnie's words, and their truth, she wanted to say I forgive you, for she knew how much Bonnie would regret, later, having said them.

  But those were not the words that came out. As if speaking in another's voice, or from another's heart, Maxine did the only thing she had ever done when hurt, which was to fight back. " Sure" she said, her voice dripping with scorn now, "go ahead and say it: I fucked up. You always picked the right guy, and I always picked the wrong one. Go ahead and say it: I told you so." Maxine gestured toward the garden, then up at the house. "You with your damned perfect life," she said.

  "All right," Bonnie said slowly, looking straight at her, eyes glittering, and Maxine wondered, with shock, Is she enjoying it, is she savoring it? Even now, in the remembering, she cannot be sure.

  "All right," Bonnie said again, speaking evenly now—finally getting somewhat of a grip on her temper— "I told you so."

  There wasn't a whole lot of room left to negotiate after that. Maxine turned and hurried up to the house to pack. Bonnie wanted to apologize, wanted to follow her up to the house and explain, but she knew where that would lead, to more arguing and pleading, and that it might awaken the children.

  This is the kindest thing, Bonnie told herself, and bent down and went back to work in her garden, trying, in only the course of a day, to get it back to where it had been.

  RELENTLESS

  SHE IS A FIRM believer in second chances; for her, they are an article of faith. In 1972, she flew up to New York to meet with RCA. Chet wasn't there to lobby for her anymore; she had finally outrun her guardian angels. Bonnie was retired and living on the farm with Brownie, and Jim Ed had his healthy solo career.

  She was desperate both financially as well as emotionally. RCA had informed Maxine by mail and then phone that they didn't want to record or release any more of her records, or those of the Browns, that they already had plenty of backlog. That the Browns' days were over. The Swinging Sixties had come and gone and the Browns had fallen by the wayside.

  Maxine was trying to adapt, had poofed her hair up into the huge gladiator helmet style and shown up in New York wearing a polka-dotted minidress and high boots—wasn't that how it was done?—but none of the RCA executives would meet with her.

  She went door to door, trying to find her old publicists, and searching for the bookkeepers, accountants, secretaries, and vice presidents with whom she had corresponded in the past. They were all gone; she could gain no entrée, could not even explain who she was, who she had been. She had a folder filled with yellowing newspaper clippings about various shows the Browns had played, and photographs—she was savvy enough to know the game was no longer all about the music—of the Browns with Ed Sullivan, and with the Beatles, and of Maxine with Johnny Cash.

  There were no photos in the folder of Elvis. For that, she was too proud, and something else. As if, were she to try to reach out and take back a part of that which he had claimed from them, there would be some short-circuitry, some hiss of sparks. He was off-limits.

  It was too powerful to speak of. It had been something different from fame. It had been friendship.

  She finally was able to intercept a junior-level executive as he came out of an office from one meeting, heading to the next. She hurried after him, her boots double-clicking to his longer strides, then caught up with him. As they both walked, briefly side by side, they passed the framed pictures of all the recording industry's luminaries, as well as those of the newly emerging RCA television industry.

  The young executive hurried along, not quite yet late to his next meeting but eager to get to it.

  Maxine lobbied for a touring schedule and then, unsuccessful with that, for even an audition for a contract—she who had produced more than twenty albums by that time and sold millions, in this country as well as abroad, money that had gone to Fabor and to RCA, with very little to her and her family, and with no savings.

  She did ever
ything but break into song as they hurried down the hall, running out of time. She suggested, then pleaded, for a duet with any of her friends who were still living, but the young executive shook his head tersely and quickened his pace, so much so that she had to put her hand on his arm to slow him down, at which point he threw her hand off and turned to her and said the words that would push her over the edge—this boy, filled with dreams of money and power, a boy who had never set foot in a logging camp or seen a man lose his arm, who had never built a fire or cleaned a deer, a boy who had never seen darkness fall over the forest while he was still in it. A boy in a hurry, but with no idea where.

  "Listen, Maxine," he said—a boy who believed that compassion was weakness, and that money, his desperate god, fled weakness. "You're yesterday's news. We're done with you. You're old hat." Then he turned and walked on, having said what was necessary to separate himself from her.

  Nobody had ever said it before, but it was her deepest fear—that not only had the world around her abandoned her, but the world below. That she had been forsaken. And worst of all, that if she had done things differently, it would not have turned out this way.

  She went back home and drank harder. She has no real recollection of the immediate years beyond that time. It was from this humiliation, however, that she would hit rock bottom, and from that wreckage, as always, she would be saved. She eventually joined AA, stopped drinking—though it was a long time coming—and began to crawl back up out of the pit, creeping inch by inch toward the shining light above, which she perceived to be the return of fame, but which, she begins to wonder now, might have been nothing more than the next day.

  JIM ED INTERVENES

  ALL HIS LIFE, he had been second fiddle, third fiddle, hidden, always invisible. Heard, certainly, in every song they ever did, but taken for granted. Utilitarian, durable, pleasant, he seemed always to be a side man, on or off the stage—secondary to Jim Reeves, in the beginning, when they rambled around in those awful shows of Fabor's, and secondary to Elvis, likewise, in the beer halls and dance halls of their youth.

  Certainly, it was his fate to be second shadow to Maxine and even Bonnie, and over the years, where a gradual regret and resentment might have grown—one that in no way would have served the glide or the chrome—Jim Ed had instead developed an accruing gracefulness in the way he accepted and embraced his forever background status. The tree in the forest that never pushes up through the canopy but that lives all its long life beneath the shade of larger, older trees. No one can see that tree from above, and it is rarely a tree even a traveler moving through the forest notices.

  Jim Ed was fully in love now. He had known hundreds of women, so many that he knew absolutely nothing about them—had become jaded, his senses dulled, his relationships a series of automatic gestures, as if long ago choreographed, with the conclusion, postcoital departure, long ago predetermined—but one day those old habits wore away, as if through the relentlessness of erosion, and love had appeared, interfering with the comfortable predictability of his life and his career.

  Helen Cornelius was ten years younger than Jim Ed, and every bit as ambitious as Maxine—an energetic showstopper of a performer with a pleasant though not necessarily extraordinary voice. Listening to her, Maxine had described her voice as accomplished but somewhat predictable—and Maxine understood, grudgingly, that there could be a value in that. Yet unlike Maxine, Helen Cornelius was relentlessly upbeat, filled with excitement, marveling and exclaiming at all that she saw. Her happiness wasn't so much the deep quiet peace of Bonnie's, but instead almost an aggressive kind. She leaned into the world with eyes bright and a smile so wide as to look almost like her teeth were bared—as if daring the resistance of negativity or unhappiness. A force for happiness, a partygoer's insistence on continual exuberance.

  It might have been exhausting for others to be around, but there was something about it that Jim Ed liked, and here, too, he was secondary, and he followed, quiet and steady in the slipstream of power. Not malleable, but instead, as ever, supporting, helping out, useful, dependable. The kind of person you could send to do any chore and know, a hundred times out of a hundred, that it would get done, and done right; no surprises would occur.

  He couldn't have said what it was he loved most about Helen Cornelius. Certainly, he had never intended to leave his sisters. And as with any beloved thing or person, there was no one way to describe why or what he loved most about her—what he needed, and what he gave in return. Any enumeration or listing would have sounded abstract, cliched. Love is a rose, love is a breath of fresh air, love is a feast. He couldn't have said, but he followed it.

  He felt different, singing duets with her; he knew that much. There was no tension or struggle to produce the sound, and when he sang with her, he sometimes felt what it was other audiences said they had been able to hear coming from the Browns in the old days: a stillness, and a cessation of worry. A calmness that, if not actually true peacefulness, was at least a place where everything was all right, everything was safe, and everyone was happy.

  He and she had only two hits; one a duet, in their second year together—"I Don't Want to Have to Marry You," written, ironically, by Maxine—and, in the year before that, even before he and Helen Cornelius were together, a hit that was all his own, written and sung by him, performed by him, only him.

  Called "Pop a Top," it became the greatest and most played jukebox hit of all time. At the time he wrote it, he was down to eight dollars in his billfold, and it was the one and only time in his life he could no longer afford to be second or third fiddle. As ever, he did what he had to do—stepped up and into the limelight—though after that one song, he quickly receded, with that one song guaranteeing him a comfortable living for the rest of his life.

  "Pop a top again—I just got time for one more round." Every time the phrase "pop a top" was sung, there would be the Pavlovian sound of a poptop beer can being cracked open, thrilling a market of millions. Jim Ed pulled on all his experience, observations of his fellow troubadours and broken-down blue-collar bar-goers, confused by life if not quite beaten, or not yet realizing they were beaten. He drew on the only culture he had ever known, the legacy that Floyd and the landscape and the era had bequeathed to him— When times get tough, start drinking harder —and turned that misery on its head, celebrated it, made it an anthem. Made what should have been shame a source of pride. As ever, he did what he had to do, went out into the brilliance alone for once, then retreated.

  As had Birdie, in her quiet and vague way, sensing possible trouble ahead for Maxine but not knowing the specificity of it, and, later, Chet, trying to warn her or even help her get back on a path that would be better for Maxine, if not necessarily for her music, Jim Ed likewise tried to give her counsel once, though only once.

  He went down to see her in West Memphis by himself. He had gigs farther on, in Dardanelle and Texarkana, and came through a day early. He had told Bonnie he was going and what he was going to talk to Maxine about, but Bonnie declined to join him. Likewise, Helen Cornelius stayed home. It wasn't quite so much that she feared the wrath, but more a simple matter of emotional economics. You just about had to be blood family to be willing to sign on for that kind of duty. Such misery was definitely not something she wanted to be around, and she wisely recognized her limitations.

  Once, but only once, Jim Ed left his place in the middle and went out to see her.

  She had been drinking so hard then. It was 1973. She was drinking so hard that she didn't have a clue that was why he was coming out to see her.

  As interventions went, it was unspectacular, and for the moment, ineffective, as Bonnie had predicted it would be. Jim Ed arrived right after the children had gone to school. His hope was to reach her before she got started, and in that he was successful, if at nothing else. She fixed him coffee—there was no food in the pantry to offer him, just a stale box of saltines, and she apologized, both of them remembering how Birdie would have received such a homecomi
ng: the banquet that would have been prepared.

  Still, it was good to see him. It wasn't what they had had as children, but it was good; it was a nice break from what the days had become. The coffee in their cups was steaming, and the crackers spilled onto his bare porcelain plate looked almost like communion. Maxine looked at the cups of coffee and was thinking how nice it would be to put a little something in the coffee, something to celebrate old times, and when she mentioned this to Jim Ed—rising before he could answer one way or the other—he said that he didn't care for that, no thank you, and that that was what he wanted to visit about with her.

  She was confused, asked if he was feeling sick, imagining some dire medical procedure he might have waiting later in the day, to not be able to receive a splash. There might in that moment have been some first and dim alarm in the cunning of her subconscious, but at first she was neither offended nor suspicious, only befuddled, and concerned.

  "Why the hell not?" she asked, and then as she studied the discomfort on his face she began to understand. Long accustomed to identifying the negative, spying the approach of trouble before anything else, she realized quickly, once she had gotten over the confusion of it, why he was there, and what he had come to say.

  Jim Ed saw the disbelief cross her face—saw the onrush of outrage, her skin darkening in splotches, her shoulders squaring up, and he hurried to say it before she could attack.

  Already she was stiffening her hands, chopping one of them in his direction like an ax. He could feel an inaudible hostility flooding from her, flowing directly toward him like a hiss of steam, and he labored to get his words out before hers, as if that might really make a difference.

  "Maxine, I'm worried about you," he said, as if reading from a note-card, a rote preparation. "We all are. We—"

  She chopped at the air so savagely that she nearly upended the coffee cups. "Who is we?" she demanded. "Where is everybody else? Why aren't they here, if it's such a problem? There is no we; this is just something you've decided," she said. "I don't have a problem, and if I did, who do you think you are, to be telling me I do?"