Nashville Chrome (12 page)

They would lay the birds out on the porch for everyone to admire, and then they would all pluck the ducks—the beautiful, brilliant feathers swirling, the miracle disassembling—and when they had the birds all cleaned, they would cook them that night on a grill outside, roasting them slowly over hickory coals, with an onion slice and strip of bacon laid over them.

Afterward, they would play canasta or hearts or bridge, and then, further into the night, they might or might not play their guitars; it did not matter—the days and nights were unending, and they did only as they wanted. They still talked about fame, a little bit, but mostly in those times between tours they simply hung out at home and prospered, and remembered that there was so much more to life than work. That almost everything—including their own brief popularity—was vastly overrated. There on Poplar Creek, in the midst of their family, they could not say why such a realization, a remembrance, brought them such happiness, only that it did.

Perhaps that was their second chance, and Bonnie and Jim Ed eventually took it. Everyone gets a second chance, but perhaps Maxine never saw hers.

Jim and Mary went home then, back to Nashville. All were invigorated by the return of sweetness—the recalibration of their lives—and each felt rejuvenated by the time spent with old friends: the Browns by their long visit with their mentors, one of their initial touchstones in the business, and Jim and Mary by the elemental isolation of the Browns. There was no name for it, but there was no denying that whatever they had was something that could be tapped into, something that rubbed off on a person, and helped.

But then they left, went back to work, and back out on the road: partly as if pushed once again by some larger destiny, and yet, were they not already also inhabiting an existing destiny?

As if two or maybe three destinies exist for all travelers, a twisted helix, with one path shining more at different times in the traveler's life—better illuminated and more attractive to the traveler, though not always the smoothest or most seamless path; and from those two or three different destinies, over the course of a traveler's life, a sound is created, if not always a harmony, which, while not audible to the travelers themselves, might possibly be heard by others who follow close enough behind them.

The harmony falling away, after that, the sound waves dissolving back into nothing, as if they had never been.

I
T WAS AN OLD
metal flatbottom boat that Jim Ed and Floyd had used for duck hunting and for checking trotlines. Elvis knew nothing about paddling, or rivers, or nature, but plenty, already, about romance. He volunteered to take Bonnie on a picnic. Despite his touring schedule, he was still finding ways to get back to Poplar Creek, even if for but a day or two. He was drawn primarily to Bonnie, but he received sustenance from all of them. They never quite knew when he would appear, or exactly when he would have to go away.

It was Maxine's belief, whenever she thought about it, which wasn't often—by that time she was pretty much all business, all ambition—that Elvis was a little frightened of her. And she could understand that. There were times when even she was a little frightened of herself. A temper—Floyd's temper—was emerging in her, whereas Bonnie had been gifted with Birdie's sweet temperament, and only Birdie's; there had been no twining of the two, no crossing over.

Maxine and Elvis were friends, nothing more. She was older, and as fierce about her music as he was. They were both going places. They weren't competitors—there was too much of a strange allegiance between them for that—and in those years, they moved in smooth and seamless parallel, with no electricity between Maxine and Elvis, only concerted striving from both of them.

When Maxine thought about it, it made sense. She was almost all work, while Bonnie was more play. Certainly, Maxine had plenty of suitors; there were many who didn't mind her drive. But Elvis didn't need anything she had; when he looked in her eyes, he could very well have been looking in the mirror.

Birdie packed Bonnie and Elvis a lunch that first time they went down the river. Jim Ed and Elvis drove Floyd's old logging truck several miles downstream, to leave at the take-out at Taylor Branch, then came back up to the house in Jim Ed's truck, so that Elvis and Bonnie would have a ride waiting for them at the end of their journey.

There was enough food to last them three or four days, and a picnic blanket, a straw hamper, and canning jars of lemonade. It was springtime, and Bonnie rode in the bow and paddled a little while Elvis stroked clumsily in the stern, banging the paddle against the gunwales, pinching his fingers and getting annoyed with the boat when it swirled and drifted sideways, not going where he wanted it to—bouncing slowly off the sides of logs along the shore—until he figured it out and found the creek's invisible but powerful centerline.

They rounded the bend, the river murmuring, the birdsong riotous, even in midday.

Elvis noted the faint sheen on Bonnie's neck, the top button of her shirt unfastened in the warmth. Elvis was excited, hopeful, and, for a little while, not thinking about music or fame, but only the joy of life—though they did have their guitars packed in burlap bags, to pick a little when they stopped for lunch.

On the river, it was easier for him to open up. The current seemed to pull from him all tensions and worries, all fears and doubts. On the river, it seemed he could say things he wasn't even sure he believed, though why else would he have been opening up, confessing them?

Telling her he never felt like he belonged to the world. How he never felt connected or attached. How he always felt as if he were falling, drifting. Except when he was up onstage and holding the guitar. That was the only time he felt in control, he said, the only time he felt like the world stopped long enough to keep from shoving him through it.

Bonnie listened. There were times when she wondered why Elvis was drawn to her instead of Maxine. She pointed out a patch of blackberries on the bank, and the two of them maneuvered the boat over to shore.

They tied the boat off and took one of the now empty jars into the blackberry patch. Once off the river, Elvis tried to hedge his earlier outpouring, tried to disown it. He asked her if she had any worries, any fears of her own, and he laughed at her when she thought about it and then said no, and he felt better, laughed again.

Train tracks ran parallel to the creek, and Bonnie and Elvis followed the berry patch out to that slash of light through the woods. It was even hotter there in the berries than it was on the creek. They walked along the tracks for a while, the jar quickly full and the two of them dropping the berries into his old shirt, which he had taken off to use for the berry gathering, his skin as pale as the cream Birdie would ladle over the berries later that evening.

The scent of creosote in the sunlight, and the heat and brilliance reflecting off the steel rails. They moved down the tracks steadily, heads down, intent, neither of them like anyone who would change the world, but like laborers. Getting scratches on their hands reaching for the biggest, juiciest berries. Laughing, racing to get to the biggest and best berries ahead of each other, whenever they saw them.

Wait,
anyone who saw them might have said—an observer in the future, gifted, or cursed, with the ability to look back.
You don't have to leave yet. You don't have to leave at all.

I
T'S HARD FOR
Bonnie to get away now, particularly in the springtime, when her garden is in full roar. She can't drive anymore—something is wrong with her inner ear so that she gets unpredictable spells of vertigo and has to lie down immediately—but she tries to get over to West Memphis to see Maxine once every month or two. Brownie has to drive her, and his hearing is shot, worse even than Maxine's, and he's still recovering from his open heart surgery of less than six months ago—but what else is there but family? It's all Bonnie knows how to do—to stay attached, connected, even if with the faintest tendrils of her visits, with the two of them, Bonnie and loyal Brownie, braving the elements to go see Maxine.

Usually, once Bonnie arrives, the three of them go to a catfish parlor out in the country: Maxine's big outing. Brownie, a physician, is retired, but is still able to dispense medication, and he brings Maxine whatever pills or shots she needs.

They dress like royalty for the occasion; they bustle in Maxine's downstairs bathroom, applying makeup, adjusting their jewelry just so, and plucking silver hairs from each other's black sweaters. It's springtime, but sometimes the air conditioner at the catfish house runs cold. In their career, they hardly ever knew elegance. Once a year, at the Grammys. The two years in a row they beat Elvis, then the two years they finished second. The year they lost narrowly to the Beatles. The time they won in country one year, then rock the next. Everyone's gone now, dust; it no longer matters to anyone but them, and among the three of them, really, it only matters to Maxine.

They enter the restaurant slowly, regally, looking around as if expecting to be recognized—if not by fans, then at least by the waiters and waitresses remembering them from their last visit a couple of months ago—but there is no such recognition, only the busy workaday comings and goings of food tray-bussing. A young woman at the front asks if they're here to see someone, and when they say no, she leads them to one of the long picnic tables at which the diners eat in family-style seating. She places them at the far end, in a corner, but that's all right: it allows Maxine to look out at all that is going on.

Bonnie and Brownie talk a little about their garden, but Maxine doesn't ask any questions about it and soon enough succeeds in moving the conversation back to music, asking Bonnie and Brownie if they've heard anything new, anything good. Neither of them has; their hearing, they say, gets worse by the hour.

"I haven't either," Maxine confides, and then sniffs. "The entertainers of today dress like paupers and streetwalkers," she says. "I don't like that." The first time they went on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
the producers had to sew a piece of cloth over Bonnie's ample figure just before the Browns went onstage, to obscure even the hint of cleavage.

The men these days are no better, Maxine reports. The country rock star with frayed jeans, beard stubble, gold earrings. What would Little Jimmy say?

"We broke the trail for them," she says, a spike of the old bitterness rising quickly. "We made it where they could succeed, and now it's like they don't respect any of that."

Bonnie and Brownie glance at each other. There's the good Maxine, calmer and more mature, just taking life one day at a time—recovering from fame—and then there's the old Maxine, with her hard and hungry heart, never sated.

Bonnie leans forward, eyes alight—suddenly she looks twenty-five years younger—and she attempts to temper Maxine's sulk, as Birdie once and always sought to address Floyd's.

"I like the old-time lyrics better," Bonnie says. "Even the silly ones. Willie Nelson's 'Stay a Little Longer'!" she exclaims, and begins to parse the song out, speaking carefully to emphasize the words' nonsensicalness, but the habit of song pulls her in, and she begins to sing.

The music of the song spills from her with silver beauty—the description of a narrator sitting in the window above, the saga of the slop bucket tumbling down, and then the seamless shift to the joy and whimsy of a mule and a grasshopper eating ice cream, the mule getting sick, and laying him on the green. She sings it as she always sang every song, as if it had always existed for her voice and hers only.

People at surrounding picnic tables look up from their plates, slightly startled by the clear belling of her voice. Fragments of fried fish dot the plastic checkered tablecloths around them. Although the diners have all been issued silverware, their fingers are shiny from the fish as well as the hush puppies. They look over at the two elegantly dressed old women and the mild old gentleman sitting with them, who is smiling as if he can still hear perfectly his wife's singing, and they stop eating for a moment, confused—all movement and motion in the restaurant pauses, then ceases, as Bonnie's voice does not so much fall over and envelop all others but instead cuts through all other sound, and best of all, in that molten, illuminated way, flows into the spaces between all other sound.

They came to dine on catfish, to eat all they can on a Friday evening, but for ten or fifteen seconds, they are treated to something else, something the likes of which they've never heard before, and they stop what they are doing, bathed by the voice, which is still clear and beautiful after all these years, and the diners are mesmerized, spellbound, bewitched.

Bonnie finishes her little lilt—"A mule and a
grasshopper?
What can that
possibly
mean?"—and in the silence that follows, the sated, exquisite stillness of an audience spellbound, Maxine and Bonnie both are reminded of the power of their gift. And though Maxine still carries more regret than is healthy, she too feels healed, briefly, by the beauty of Bonnie's little song. Strangely, Maxine is not gripped by the lesser, baser response of envy, but is temporarily elevated.

It was hard for Maxine not to jump in when Bonnie started singing spontaneously. She would have, in the old days, without a moment's hesitation. But not now. Her pride's too fierce, her clamant insistence on perfection. She's unwilling, even in so ignoble a venue as a catfish parlor, to step into the slipstream of Bonnie's sudden grace without being fully ready, fully warmed up.

The hunger was there, though. That night, she remembers that they've made a pact with one another: that if they ever do perform again as a trio, they will quit the first time they fail to get a standing ovation.

Bonnie does not get one that night in the restaurant—there isn't even any applause, but instead, just that confused kind of brief attention from the other diners, recognizing they're hearing something different, and something special, but not knowing what it is—but this doesn't really count, for it's not an official performance, or even a full song; and most important, it's not the trio. It was just Bonnie making a bewitching little sound.