Nashville Chrome (15 page)

The sales for the Browns' last three hits—"Rhythm of the Rain," "You Can't Grow Peaches on a Cherry Tree," and "I Heard the Bluebirds Sing"—were the same as for Elvis's last three, but the audiences were different now. Some of the listeners were starting to cross over from country to pop. They might be back one day—they would be back—but there were larger cultural forces at work. The audiences were crossing over, following another now. The thing that had made the Browns so revered—the ability to tamp down any unrest and present a smooth surface—would ultimately be their weakness, but they would be the last to know it. It would take Maxine fifty years to figure it out, the faintest breeze beginning to make little ripples on the surface of that smooth water.

Elvis was touring like crazy while the Browns treaded water, waiting for Jim Ed's hand to heal. They were starving for the stage. Elvis wasn't rich yet but was beginning to enter and map the territory of rich. He wasn't Elvis, Inc., yet, but a lot can change in six months at that age, and with such uncontrollable power surging up through so flexible and malleable a vessel as the human soul and the mortal body.

Whenever he got to within a hundred miles of the Trio Club, he would detour, drawn by sweet Bonnie, and by the lights on the hill. He would drive through the night to get there, would call up Bonnie and tell her he was coming in, then would get on the phone with Birdie and ask if she was cooking anything special.

He'd get in after midnight and would be back on the road shortly after daylight, after breakfast and a short walk with Bonnie. Then he would be gone, while the rest of the Browns stayed behind, believing that they still had everything they had started out with, that nothing was going away.

And Elvis, on his drive back north, feeling reinvigorated, refreshed, more powerful, more illuminated. Driving east back to Nashville, into the morning sun, a song playing on the radio, listening to one of his own songs sometimes, and laughing. It sounded pretty good.

N
OW THE HARD TIMES
really began—the first truly swooping lows. They were terrified, not yet understanding that the lows were only the setup for the highs. Instead, they held on tightly, and just rode—not in control, but holding on.

The army drafted Jim Ed despite the injury to his hand. Maybe he wouldn't be able to fire weapons, but they could find some use for him. He would be in the service indefinitely. Floyd went to his congressman, argued that he was a one-legged sawmill operator, that he was just about to reopen the mill and needed his son to help run it, and that the mill was needed for the war effort—but there was no war; they were between wars. At least let him stay in Arkansas, Floyd argued, but the army sent him to California.

Elvis got drafted as well but was able to get a gig performing for the troops and was able to keep his songs out in the market. It was not an insubstantial fork in their paths.

Back home, Maxine didn't give up. She and Bonnie practiced with Norma, tried to play a few shows like that, but it was hard: Norma was still in school, and they needed Jim Ed. Their sound needed him to stabilize it—to temper Maxine's hidden despair and Bonnie's unadulterated cleanliness. They waited, and Maxine wrote songs. It wasn't the end of the world. People still knew who they were. They were still famous; their songs were still playing on the radio.

How durable would the gift be? Should they have guarded it more carefully? They cannot be blamed for thinking it was indestructible, beyond the ability to just fade away.

In Pine Bluff, there was a handsome small-town lawyer, hard partier, heavy drinker, and womanizer, Tommy Russell. He started hanging around Maxine during her downtime between tours. She thought he would settle down, would stop chasing other women, would love only her, would stop drinking, would provide her daily and nightly with what she was missing, not being up on the stage. She was wrong.

O
NE OF THE THINGS
she's noticed about getting older, about being so old, is not what she would have expected—the cascade of memories—but the opposite phenomenon: a vast forgetting. Sometimes it feels like a walling-off, the creation of one compartment after another, into which she sequesters one imperfection after another, until finally her mind has become a house in which every room has become filled, every closet jam-packed, every drawer stuffed with all that she does not want to remember and never wanted to have happen.

She doesn't know what the source of her talent is—she understands she'll never know that, until maybe right at the end—but she has come to understand the nature of the talent, which is the ability to inhabit, with grace, the blank spaces between old established things. To fill that empty space with the sound of longing and, paradoxically, the sound of assurance—of calm satisfaction.

There never really was any assurance, but that was what people wanted to believe.

Maybe there had been some assurance. Maybe there had been calm satisfaction, too—fragments of it, at least, that she accidentally walled off in trying to cover up all the disappointments or mistakes.

Carefully, some days, she begins to go back into some of those walled-off areas to search for those little moments in the missing years that she overlooked, passed by or never noticed. The good that went unacknowledged, and that got shoveled over with the bad.

Was she moving too fast to notice anything, in those middle years, or was she simply too drunk?
My God,
she thinks,
if I could have those thirty or forty middle years back, I could have been somebody, I could have done something. Not Raymond- and Norma-worthy, but something. Not perfect, but better than I was.

In a fight, she always went straight to the biggest person in the room, the one who could do her the most harm—getting in an argument with the president of a record company, or the owner of a regional network. She didn't back down from anyone. She couldn't bear to think of being frightened of anything.

She opens one of the most distasteful walled-off areas. She remembers Tommy. She remembers the wedding, remembers what she thinks might have been brief satisfaction, though even now she's not quite sure, and looks back at it as if watching an old movie with no sound, a film in which she thinks she recognizes one of the women as herself, younger but no longer quite young.

She's been so careful to keep the unpleasant and even horrific years of her marriage—what a dumb-ass idea that was! why didn't someone stop her?—walled off that she covered it all up, good and bad.

Why work so hard to get rid of something only to then risk bringing it back? It makes no sense, and she wonders if she's dying, if this is what happens near the end. Perhaps certain chemicals begin to dissolve those walls so that all those hoarded or safeguarded disappointments come spilling back into the rest of the architecture. Or maybe a person doesn't have to be dying for it to happen. Maybe the disappointment and bitterness begin to rot and fester and ferment once all the storage space is jam-packed. It creates a sweet acid that begins to slowly erode the integrity of the structure that housed that disappointment until finally one day all the walls are gone and life comes flooding back.

Is this what it's like for Bonnie?
Maxine wonders, and for the ten thousandth time she wonders why Bonnie gets to be so damned happy all the time, while she, Maxine, has to always carry the heaviest load.

She's not envious of Bonnie, she tells herself. That would be a bad thing. You're not supposed to be jealous of a sister. That's common, and she's anything but that. She's mostly just amazed, is all. She marvels at how Bonnie—and, for that matter, Jim Ed—got all of it while Maxine got none of it.

Courage.
The box, the compartment, is spilling out now, so why not open it? She's too tired to run from it and there's nowhere left to go anyway. She moves closer to the spoils, curious, having almost forgotten that which she worked hard to forget.

She's fidgety, but is surprised, for as the first wave of swamp muck comes oozing over her ankles—vaguely warm, as if made that way by some innocuous chemical activity, like blood or urine, or the sea in sunlight—she can find in the ferment none of the terrible memories she's been keeping boxed up, but instead something interesting, something positive. It is a thing that, as best as she can tell, is mildly pleasant, bittersweet, and she considers the recollection with no small amount of suspicion.

Is it a trick, and why hadn't she noticed it the first time it went past?

She hadn't been looking to get married when she met Tommy Russell, a small-town lawyer working in the big city of Pine Bluff, pop. 28,000, some fifty miles north of Sparkman and Poplar Creek. She hadn't even been looking to date anyone, not steadily; her primary relationship was touring, singing, and songwriting. Anything else, and anyone else, would have slowed that down.

He was good-looking, though that couldn't have been all of it; she had seen handsome men before. Was he more handsome than Elvis? Certainly not, but handsome enough, and possessing a flair, a confidence—a sharp-edged self-awareness that, back then, she never imagined could hurt her. Tall and dark-haired, he had something else, a devilishness, and it was an old story: his attentions flattered her. It seemed to her that when the two of them were together they drew more attention than she did when alone. It wasn't like having Jim Ed and Bonnie on either side of her, but it was almost like that. He filled all available spaces with himself; he summoned attention.

He was a hard drinker but that had seemed like fun at the time, and there were few in her world who were not. Even Bonnie and Elvis would party with them on the road, though they were both pretty good about being able to make a drink last much of the evening rather than gulping it down. Bonnie was, anyway; there were some nights when Elvis was a gulper already, though others when he remained in control, merely took the smallest sips.

But that was Elvis, and it's Tommy whom she's trying to remember. All her life she's taken great pains not to speak ill of him, though there was so much about which she could have: the drinking, the chronic unfaithfulness, the verbal abuse. The source of so much of her great unhappiness during those middle years, or so she believed for a long time. An unfairness, a burden no one should have to carry, though he is long gone now, died ten years ago, carries no burden whatsoever; though still, she has kept all that toxic brew closed off.

What she sees and remembers now frightens her, however, for in the remembering, she sees it just as she saw it then: wonderful, exhilarating, intoxicating. She had thought it had been all misery and woe, and to realize now that for a moment, however brief, it wasn't, unsettles her; as if, given a second chance, she would make the same mistakes all over again.

For their first date, he took her to see a case he was arguing. A man had been accused—rightly, it turned out—of embezzling from the governor's office, then blackmailing the governor and his staff with details of various affairs. It was a big case, and there had even been threats against Tommy's client's life—bodyguards were present at the trial—and it thrilled her to see the power Tommy commanded, with not just the jury, judge, and spectators as his audience, listening intently to every word, but a further audience as well, call it the scales of justice or even God, with fate in the balance, fate held in Tommy's outstretched hands as he argued, pleaded, cajoled, scolded, declaimed.

Tommy won the case, and two weeks later, at a party, asked her to marry him, and she said sure, yes.

Bonnie, of all people, tried to talk her out of it. Her little sister! What did Bonnie know of love? It turned out she could not have been more right, but even now it rankles Maxine that Bonnie had given such counsel. As if, in her crush with Elvis, Bonnie thought she already knew everything there was to know of love. She had been right and Maxine had been wrong, but still, it rankles her.

The memory, however, has been modified while in storage. Maxine remembers the pride—a franticness in her heart—when, upon announcement of the verdict, Tommy shook his client's hand quickly but then sought her out, came straight to her, and with all eyes still on him. He had left his client too quickly in his eagerness to come see her, and his client trailed after him, moving through the throng.

Maxine heard the man expressing his thanks, mixed with disbelief—it had been clear to Maxine, at least, that they had had him dead to rights—and she was surprised by both the brusqueness and the essence of Tommy's answer.

"There's no need to thank me," he told his client. "I would have worked just as hard for the other fellow." He paused, his dark eyes almost black, and with adrenaline still surrounding him, dense and palpable. "I would have nailed you to the wall," he said, and the man withdrew his hand, wilted back into the crowd.

Maxine had totally misread things that day. She had not considered Tommy's anger to be that of self-loathing but had instead thought his was an anger of righteousness, that he judged and disapproved of his client.

She had not known sourness or ferment that day, only hope and admiration. There had been a power in the courthouse, and she had been a part of it, swept along with it, and best of all, for the first time she hadn't had to produce that power to keep things moving or get people to hear her. It was just happening, as if that was its natural and due course.

Was this how it was for Bonnie with Elvis? She imagined that it was.

She won't go so far as to acknowledge that such a thing might not have been healthy or the best possible course for Bonnie. But remembering her immense mistake and the decades of consequences, she experiences a glimmer of understanding of one of the people whom she should know best in the world but who is in so many ways her opposite.

Maxine peers into the box further, and is further surprised: there is only mild pleasure. The torment is gone. Where is the poison she had expected—where is the putrefaction? Has some bizarre alchemy occurred across the many years—one that has rendered, completely unbeknownst to her, disappointment into beauty, venality into integrity, loss into gain?