Nashville Chrome (24 page)

The ragged dance of such leave-taking; now it was her turn to shake her head and draw away from the density of the thing between them, while for only the first time now he sought to address it, and so much too late. She was annoyed with herself for the way the sound of his voice resurrected old hopes, old pleasures.

"Let's paddle," she said, suddenly eager to leave the beach—understanding at some level that motion would help soothe him, would begin in some way the sealing-over process of healing—and so somewhat sullenly, he got up and began gathering their picnic items, and doing the emotional math for the first time, which of the two ways he wanted go.

All his life, so many of his decisions seemed to have been made for him as if by fate, simply by following the paths of impulse or opportunity. This seemed entirely different: it seemed to require a calculation as prodigious as were the consequences risky—fame or happiness?—though even by the act of considering the two, the answer had already been reached.

So they pulled back for a while, each into a place of hurt, seeking some protection in that new distance. Elvis paddled sometimes with irritation or frustration, other times with despair—and for a while they pretended a decision had not been reached. They didn't even so much smooth it over as seal it off for a little while; and as they resumed their drift, it felt to Bonnie as if she had to paddle to catch up with a new segment of life that had flowed past during the time they had lain there on the beach, while to Elvis it seemed as if they should not have left the beach, or that something had been left there—something he had forgotten and wanted back but would not be able to find again.

At least they were not quarreling. They never had, nor would they. The closest they came was later in the afternoon, when—still trying to keep at bay the unpleasantness of the disagreement of the breakup—they pulled into an eddy and baited their cane poles with worms, feeling that since they had brought the poles, they should use them.

They fished in silence, pretending to concentrate, for nearly an hour, the heat sending slow trickles of sweat down their backs. They sat as motionless as was possible to keep from spooking any drifting-by or hanging-around fish, and Bonnie's face was partially hidden in the shadow cast by her wide straw hat, and, as ever, she was more patient. Elvis swatted at a gnat, caught it and crushed it, tossed it onto the water's surface, where no fish rose to examine it.

"Too hot for the fish to bite," he said—in his heart, thinking,
Next time we come it will be better,
a lump in his throat, a burning in his chest—and Bonnie said quietly, "Fish deeper."

"Nah," he said—be damned if he would let a girl tell him how to fish, never mind that it was her home creek—and he stilled his fidgeting, stared more intently at his red and white bobber, willing a fish to take the worm, and not just any fish, but a big one. Telling himself that he would not leave until that happened, and willing it to be a fish of such immensity that Bonnie would laugh and scream, that it would be something she'd remember always, and that the excitement of the catch would cause her to rethink things, and to change her mind.

That if the fish was large enough, they could somehow go back to where they had always been before.

Bonnie was hot and getting hotter. Her line was still in the water, and from all outward appearances she was still focusing on waiting for a fish, but in her mind she had stopped fishing, was hoping she would not catch a fish, and was already looking ahead to the business of getting on with her future—of beginning to heal up over the heartbreak and continuing on with her life, and still feeling that strange and uncomfortable sensation that she needed to catch up with something that had passed her by while she had waited there on the beach.

Elvis's bobber went under: dipped twice, then plunged deep, and he shouted, gave a yank on his pole and set the hook, and shouted again as the line sawed back and forth through the water with the unseen treasure bolting.

In that moment, he felt the old pure joy of who he had once been—who he still was, barely—rushing through him with the hope and confidence that disaster had been averted.

It wasn't a big fish, though. When he hoisted it from the water, he and Bonnie both saw that it was barely eating-size. It was right at the cusp of the size where if an angler was hungry he or she would keep the fish, though it would not make much of a meal—would not even satisfy a child's appetite—or the angler could toss the fish back, saving the trouble of having to clean it, and could feel slightly virtuous.

Elvis wanted to keep the fish—he believed that his only chance of having her remain, the only indication that she might be willing to reconsider and to remember and appreciate their love and not relinquish it, would be if she agreed to keep the middling fish, as they had done so many times before.

"Well, chum," Elvis said, speaking to the potbellied little fish as it swung at the end of his line, "we've seen bigger, but you'll do. Maybe we'll catch a few more of your friends."

"Oh, Elvis," Bonnie said, "he's too small. Let's throw him back. Let's let him live."

Elvis huffed up, looked at her as if he had never even considered such a thing and couldn't understand why she would even suggest it. "He's eating-size," he lied. "Not by much, but he'll do. I'm hungry," he lied again. His heart thrashing and darting. He was still holding the cane pole aloft, the little fish was still twisting on the line, awaiting its fate—gold-rimmed eyes wide, gills working hard in the bright air—and Elvis, in the first concession to loss, dipped the fish back down in the water just long enough to wet it, then lifted it back out. As if upon its reemergence it might somehow appear larger.

He pulled the line in then and unhooked the fish, as he had done thousands of times before. The long bronzed hook, the fragment of pale earthworm still attached, shoved up to the shank.

"Please let him go," Bonnie said. "Please throw him back." But Elvis whacked the fish hard against the side of the boat, intending to kill it, but only stunning it. The fish quivered, then recovered and resumed its thrashing.

Bonnie began to cry again, and Elvis immediately lost all heart and said, "Look, honey," and tossed the fish back into the creek—it shuddered off, inky black, back down into the deeper brown waters, where it might one day grow to be a giant, shunning all hooks and the overhead passing of boats' bellies, blocking out the sun—but it was too late: Bonnie's shoulders were shaking, and when he scooted forward in the canoe and tried to console her, she shrugged off his touch and hissed, "
Don't.
"

In a way it was the kindest thing he could have done, making it easier for her. Perhaps there was even some kindness in him, some instinct, that had known that, or perhaps it was the world's instinct; whatever the reason, both of their injured hearts began the hard process of turning away and drying up, the first layer of desiccation wrinkling the surface.

They paddled on downstream in silence, both with something new in them that seemed like its own kind of fierceness, a thing that had not been in them before: a survivor's fierceness.

The afternoon was growing late; it would be almost dusk before they got to the take-out, and early dark before they got back home, and they paddled all the way to the bridge without speaking, instead concentrating only on the efficiency of their strokes so that they might get there sooner, and both furious that the beautiful thing had gone away, had been lost, let go.

There was a bonfire burning in the yard when they got back, and they came driving in slowly. They were speaking to each other now concerning only the most perfunctory of matters—who would put the picnic hamper away, did Elvis need help with the boat—and as they drew nearer they could see the figures of their family standing around the fire, could hear the music, the sound of their singing, and their hearts buckled but then grew harder, both as determined now to survive as they had been previously to love deeply. The swoop and swoon of the world, and Bonnie felt some small satisfaction that she might have caught back up with whatever had passed her by there on the beach earlier in the day, though the cloud of guilt was immense.

Elvis didn't stay the night, but left straight away, though with a hope that seemed so strange to him as to not even feel like it was quite his but coming from some further, other place. Bonnie, likewise, was plagued that night by the sound of his voice and the memory of pleasure—
I could go back,
she thought,
I could still go back
—but in the morning the sun was bright, and later that afternoon, there was another letter in the mailbox, and she moved on, further and deeper into the future.

T
HERE IS A QUESTION
Maxine has for herself, as she opens more boxes and vaults from that long spell when upon beholding the world beyond her she saw that the world was no longer looking at her, and in her panic at that observation, she failed to behold the world.

Her question has to do with fortune or luck—not fame, but simple luck. She and her siblings had so much of it in their early years. Did it go away, in that strange middle ground that she has trouble remembering, or was it still there, simply unnoticed by her, during that time of panic?

She thinks it went away. There had been hard times in their youth, but it seemed they got harder later in life, and that—despite what she had believed to the contrary—wealth had nothing to do with it, and neither did fame.

She expected and understood that she would one day lose Birdie, and Floyd, too; and she understood that she would miss Floyd, would even grieve him, despite or in some strange way perhaps because of his harshness and unpredictability, and his habit of pushing her hard, and of never believing that anything she ever did was quite good enough, even as he was thrilled by her, and their, fame.

The emptiness in her, after he died: it was good that was gone, but it was surprising how there was a part of her that was thrown off-balance by its absence. She had seen trees like that in the forest, a pine growing too close to an oak, each pressing against the other, so that what in some ways was initially a competition for water, light, and nutrients eventually ended up being a system of necessary support, with each of the two weakened trees helping hold up the other.

She lost Norma when Norma was only in her midfifties; the Browns' career was already long gone, with Norma never having done more than pinch-hit for Bonnie or Maxine at one show or another, on the increasingly frequent occasions when last-minute family duties had prevented Bonnie from being able to make a show, or when Maxine's dramas with Tommy flared up, or when Maxine had simply been drinking too much and was unable to perform.

It was a different sound with Norma, and though Norma's voice was the clearest and strongest of all of them, the sound of the four of them never really took off. Their voices had never had the chance, given their age differences growing up, to become the living, supple thing—almost like a single breath—that those of Maxine and Jim Ed and Bonnie had. Norma was technically perfect, but that was almost the problem. Even to a listener not gifted with the ability to parse out the individual tones and notes, it was evident there was a difference. The sound was pleasant and accomplished but not magical. It was mistake-free but flatter for its lack of necessary corrections. It ascended and descended with a thing like caution, and lacked the restless confidence of Bonnie's and Maxine's notes together.

It was too good,
Maxine thinks,
too smooth.
So good that Norma didn't need the three of them to polish her sound—but in that isolation, that position of strength, there was less magic, and a little more of what was only a cool proficiency.

Norma alone among them had gone to music school, had studied diligently, honing her perfection, and was never interested in fame, but instead only in bettering herself and her talent. She had been a teenager when the Browns were at the peak of their fame and had dreamed about it then, had longed to join in with her sisters and brother on the stage, but she insisted later in life that that yearning had gone away and that she had been utterly content with her life spent teaching middle school music—choir and band—in Indiana, at a small rural school on the outskirts of Bloomington.

Maxine had never quite believed Norma's protests of happiness or contentedness—why else had she gone to six years of music school, if not in an effort to catch up with, and join, her older, famous siblings?—and felt guilty sometimes for not having done more to help work Norma into the group, allowing her to join them in a quartet, later in life, at certain lesser venues where the standards were not as exacting, or letting Norma open for them, singing her beautiful solos.

It was just timing, just the sheer separation of years, that prevented them from all being closer, and they never really had the chance to live a life with her. They continued to think of her as the baby, long after she was no longer that, and even after she was gone, taken from them at fifty-eight by a massive heart attack, leaving a grieving husband and students in Indiana—half of her ashes scattered there, and half by the cabin at Poplar Creek—the Browns still had trouble thinking of her as anything but the baby, always waiting to join them but never able to. She left behind for her siblings a world of nieces and nephews, their photos taped to the Browns' refrigerator doors, but with the pictures increasingly a few years behind real time, until finally the children grew up, not really knowing their aunts and uncles and cousins, and the still greater distancing proceeded.

It wasn't what Birdie would have wanted, but there just wasn't time.

Why couldn't it have been different?
Maxine wonders.
Why couldn't Norma have been born closer in age? Why did she have to go off to Indiana and start a whole new life—why couldn't everything have stayed the way it was?

It simply couldn't, of course, but why did Maxine waste so much time hiding from what life had become once it turned sour? Wouldn't it have been better to experience the sour rather than walling it off and experiencing nothing at all? She wasn't there for Norma's passing, didn't write all the condolence letters she wanted to. What would Birdie, Queen of Family, say? Even Floyd would disapprove.