Nashville Chrome (16 page)

If so, what a double waste: the waste of the initial rotting, and then the second waste, in failing to witness the alchemy of rot back into sweetness. As if there are some in the world who simply cannot win for losing.

But for a while, there was nothing but winning.
Be damned,
she thinks.
I will get back to that.

Neither she nor Tommy ended up being able to control much of anything, much less the directions or outcomes of their lives—but they put on a beautiful wedding. It's strange, she thinks, that she has the courage now to look back, and stranger still that she should see that it was beautiful.

The ceremony itself was a big church wedding at the Baptist church in Memphis, but it's the reception afterward that she's remembering. One of Tommy's bosses owned an estate north of town—there was no other word for it but
mansion
—and the wedding party went there after the ceremony.

Blue barbecue haze lay like fog over the green rolling hills, and the music of fiddles and banjos and mandolins drifted from beneath the big canvas tent set up for the musicians, of which it seemed there were hundreds. Guitars were leaning everywhere, and country people from the hills, identifiable by their informal dress—Maxine's people, in clean slacks and clean shirts and old leather shoes shined—wandered the grounds, rarely conversing with the attorneys and judges who stood in clumps and clusters, in their suits. Seen from afar, it might have looked like a battleground, with the two opposing armies arranging in slow combat, and the blue smoke from the barbecue appearing like that from cannons. The musicians' tent a gathering place for generals, and even the sleek horses that grazed in the fields beyond looking like the saddleless mounts of cavalry. A few men and women lounged on the hillsides with their straw hats pulled over their eyes, and from a great enough distance, it might have seemed that they were the first casualties of a skirmish that was only beginning.

There were, however, clues that it was not a war. Small children moved among the horses, petting them and feeding them handfuls of summer grass. Women walked arm in arm with other women, young and old, not as if in assistance of the injured, but as they had once done in a time before the war. And to such a faraway viewer gifted also with the ability to hear all sounds, no matter how delicate or muted, that spectator would have seen the band of chefs in their starched white aprons and high, billowing hats, looking like surgeons at first, coming out of one of the tents, carrying glinting knives and silver platters.

The pride and officiousness of the chefs as they carried plates to the long buffet table would have indicated to the viewer that maybe it was not a war after all, but merely a great feast, and when one of the chefs, after much consultation, was given the honor of ringing the great iron bell out in the yard of the mansion, the peal of it would have rolled out to that distant audience, and would have found freedom and a certain style in the great loneliness of space between that spectator and all those gathered below.

As the clang and ringing of the bell traveled across that distance, the sound waves would have spread out into greater and more relaxed amplitudes, then would have begun to waver and shimmer in their inevitable disintegration—the sound acting like a living thing briefly in possession of spirit and soul, but susceptible, like all else in the world, to the inevitable decay and sheer mechanical reduction wrought by friction and time, and with the listener feeling starved for more, as he or she first detected that wavering, that unwinding of the perfect sound as it began to first loosen, thread by thread.

Before that, though—just before that—there would have been perfection. Across the uncompromised and sculpted space of the landscape itself, the sound waves would have found a brief synchrony with the shapes of all the things below and over which they traveled.

The slopes and curves of the sound would have followed the slopes and curves of the hills, would have flowed gently left and right of any obstacles such as boulders or trees. There would have been a greatness to the sound, a fullness, in the freedom of all that space, and as the resonance of it filled the listener and began to act within the listener himself, there would have been confusion; for even though the sound of the bell was just now reaching the listener, the bell ringer had already turned his back and was walking away.

How long was it good before it turned bad? A month with Tommy, or six weeks, before she realized her mistake, but clung stubbornly to hope?

"There's not a skirt he won't chase," Bonnie told her. "You're not going to change him. He's just marrying you because you're famous. If you ever stopped, he'd be gone in a week. He'll be gone in a week anyway. Please," Bonnie said. "I know he's fun but you don't have to marry him."

There was still time for Tommy to get better. Hell, there was a whole long lifetime in which things could get better. Maxine laughs quietly, marvels at what she has found in the box. It was atrocious, it was unbearable, but for a long while she had withstood it. And look, now: she had been mistaken, it had not been all bad. Why hadn't she been able to enjoy what she enjoyed? Why had she let the imperfections corrupt all the goodness?

Who in her life ever told her she wasn't good enough, besides herself? It certainly wasn't Birdie. Every day of her life, Birdie doted on her; informed all her children that the sun rose and set on each of them. Tommy told her with his actions that she wasn't good enough—prowling after other women whenever she went out on the road. But he was just a two-bit fucker, she sees that now; at eighty, she sees what Bonnie saw at twenty.

Was it Floyd who told her? She doesn't want to acknowledge this, and though they fought like cat and dog, she doesn't ever really recall him saying those words
You're not good enough.
Maybe he did and she has plastered those words over in the gerrymandered architecture of her life, but she doesn't think he did. What she remembers is the pride—perhaps, too immense a pride—he took in their sudden success.

She remembers the fights, but he was her father: he loved her. There were times when he withheld his love, times when he turned away and was isolated from everyone, was only pretending to be present, with either his merry drunkenness, or his belligerence, or his sullenness, or despair, or euphoria. His mercurial moods were amplified by the bottle, and with the radiant waves of those moods suddenly and in no way echoing or imitating the contours around and beneath him—
the family.
Calm or raging, when he drank, he was center stage—and maybe it was that simple: when he drank, he wasn't quite himself, but was a performer of sorts, and in that manner, withheld his truer self from them all; and in that withholding, he told her, told all of them,
You're not good enough—I choose drinking instead of you.

But did anyone actually ever speak those dreaded words to her out loud, or did they come from within?

Floyd was born in 1895. Parts of three centuries separate the then from the now, the beginning of his life and the trailing-away of hers, and yet the sound wave of him, the disturbed energy of his presence and actions in the world, will not fade. A hundred and fifteen years separates where he began and where she is now, and what she remembers when she thinks of her father is not so much the fights of adolescence over control and suspicion, boundaries and rebellion, or his heroic labors in the forest, trying to scrape together a living, but the quiet dark spaces of early evening, the relative silences when he would come in from the mill, smelling of sawdust and diesel, and would go to the cabinet and take down his bottle and pour his first small glass of whiskey.

The brassy twist of the cap, its first little squeaky sound. The splash, the short gurgle. The immense feeling of relief spilling from him as his homecoming filled the cabin. As if he had traveled a long way to make it back to them, and back to that bottle, and had arrived just in time, as darkness fell, and that it had saved him.

S
HE REMEMBERS THE
first time she heard him referred to as the King. It caught her by surprise, but she didn't give it much thought one way or the other. She didn't think it would stick, thought it was just a nickname some local station used for him. She thought it was overreaching, a parody of ambition. Weren't they all, despite their surprising successes, still just local musicians traveling from one small town to the next, and occasionally getting to play a larger venue, like the Opry?

None of the Browns had a clue. They were like racehorses with blinders, thundering down the dirt track. There was a jockey lashing them and the horses were dimly aware that there were people in the stands, but they thought nothing of where the track was going—whether it was straightening or circling in a loop—or of the consequences of their efforts and accomplishments. They knew only that there was some flyweight jockey on their back, urging them on, directing them to do that which they already loved doing.

The flyweight rider therefore almost, but not quite, unnecessary, irrelevant. What rider? The horse in its blinders cannot see. The horse out on the track feels only the other horses falling back in groups of ones and twos, then clumps of threes and fours. Knows nothing of history, or of any arc beyond the moment of the next stride.

The promoters of Graceland hold a major festival each August to commemorate his untimely death. They celebrate everything about him, from the sweet country boy he was to the bloated extrapolation of insatiable American appetite and surface showmanship that he became. His worshipers prowl the grounds of Graceland with metal detectors that they've smuggled in before being accosted by security guards. They flock through in their pilgrimage, telling stories of connections in which they've participated—a toy stuffed animal signed by him, a comb he was alleged to have used once. As time marches on, the list of hallowed associates grows ever shorter, even as the pilgrims'
zealotry grows more intense with the accruing distance. As if seeking blindly in their annual congregation to reassemble, like astronomical nebulae, enough of the strange burning to resurrect even a glimmer of what was. Of what he carried within him always, and of what he made them feel.

To such sojourners, anything he touched is sacred, and any person he touched, or who touched him, hallowed. They brought his parents out regularly while they were living and bombarded them with the most unthinkable questions, shoved to the front of the line to show them windowpanes in which the pilgrim thought she sometimes saw the King's profile. Asking Elvis's old daddy for a lock of his hair, a fingernail. As the years pass by, the organizers have invited his dentist—"Shake the hand that filled Elvis's cavities!"—to answer questions about the King's oral hygiene, what his tonsils looked like.

At these conventions, no small number of the attendees wander the grounds dressed like Elvis, or thinking that they are dressed like him. Some of them miss the mark by quite a bit, while the others represent him fairly accurately at all the different stages of his life. There are baby Elvises in strollers, clad in dark glasses, with grease-blackened hair. It's a clan, a cult willing to drink whatever Kool-Aid is put before them, but it's an audience, it's worship and acclaim, even if slightly indirect, and each year when the promoters invite the Browns, Maxine says yes, in the years she's well enough to make the journey.

Jim Ed is always working, and Bonnie doesn't dare go—among the faithful who even know about her early romance, there are many who believe that when she ended their relationship, she started him on his spiral—but Maxine always goes when she's able.

The promoters promise to set up a little booth where Maxine can sit and sell her CDs and sign autographs. Maxine has learned over the years to bring a pillow to sit on, padding the folding metal chair. She smiles, grimaces at the sillier questions, tries to answer the ones she can—tries to interject a little about herself, and her career, and that of her brother and sister, but only rarely gets the chance for that. With her diminished hearing, she often can't quite make out what they're saying to her, and so only nods politely and signs, in careful, shaky, spidery scrawl, her full name, Maxine Brown—she dropped the Russell after the divorce—on whatever odd package or item they are shoving across the table at her. Usually an old album of his, but often anything—a tie, a gas receipt, the back of a hand. They must have contact, even if they don't know what it is they're contacting. They are lost, each and every one of them, and for a short while, she feels almost motherly toward them; it makes her feel considerably better, recognizing how lost they are, makes her feel as if she herself is not.

Napkins are the worst. No matter how careful she is, the pen always catches and tears the paper, leaves a blotted, unsatisfactory mess; though still they shove them at her, wanting to accumulate and gather anything and everything, starving and lonely and long adrift.

Each year they send for her in a limousine, which thrills her. She spends days, weeks, beforehand, anticipating, trying on different outfits, experimenting with different makeup, and humming, crooning, keeping her voice supple, in case someone should ask her to sing an impromptu song. The organizers will put her up in a garish suite: a king-size four-poster bed with velour curtains, cloying potpourri, Graceland ashtrays, photographs and velvet paintings adorning the walls, and shag carpet thick enough to lose a golf ball in.

It's the best time of year for her, August. She loves the vile and mismatched tasteless opulence of the hotel room—the Negro waiters from room service, the giant television screen, the air conditioner set on fifty-six degrees while outside the temperature exceeds a muggy one hundred degrees. She even loves sitting in the metal folding chair at her little card table, smiling brightly at the brief gawking of passing-by strangers, a few of whom stop to visit.

But best of all, she loves the ride in the long black limousine. She sits way in the back, all dressed up, and chats through the speakerphone with whichever affable chauffeur they have sent, telling him her life story while he listens with interest. Adjusting the air conditioner in the plush leather seat, and hurtling down the road, the big shark of a car, smooth and powerful, piloted by the elegant uniformed driver in utter control of the road, passing one ailing car after another on the too short drive up to Graceland: the fender-sprung sputtering old truck in front of them loaded down with green twisted firewood or piled high with the bric-a-brac of moving day, residue of a divorce sale or possibly a family still barely intact but seeking a more affordable rent; the bald-tired Bel Air or Impala muffler-dragging and low-riding with death spirals of blue-gray smoke blatting from behind; and cane poles lashed to the roof, hunter-gatherers setting out in search of the afternoon's sustenance.