Nashville Chrome (28 page)

Elvis fussed a little on the topic of Brownie, not so much in the hopes of ever getting her back—he had other business to tend to; he could see and understand that now—but hemming and hawing more out of concern for Bonnie, that she might be making a mistake, a choice that would impinge on the very thing he loved most about her, her happiness.

"But sweetie," he protested, trying to articulate it, "I don't even
know
the dude."

Her laughter, the trill of it—the pure peal—relaxed him and told him all he needed to know, that she really was in love, and that, just as important, it would last.

The knowledge of what he had left behind, and of what he had taken, would come to him slowly over the years, even as he became numbed, medicated, scarred over, detached and distanced from the brief wonder of life. Often, in recording sessions with his backup singers, the Jordanaires, an all-white chorus, he would feel that something was missing from his recording, something soulful and immense, and the older he got, the more he understood what it was.

From behind the opiates and the booze he would order another take, and then another, would call out to the producer as well as to the Jordanaires, "Give me some of that Brown sound!"—but by that time no one ever understood what he was talking about, assumed instead he was talking about James Brown, and punched their vocals up in the other direction, making it more bluesy, more rock-and-roll.

Fame still would not leave them entirely—was it gnawing on Maxine's misery, or was it attracted to Bonnie and her brilliant cheer? The year 1962 was the first in which they didn't have a number one hit, but they rebounded, had three the next year.

Perhaps the fame was drawn equally to the movements—the peace as well as the agony—of the three of them. Perhaps it could not stay away. Everything beneath them was collapsing; they had thought they were standing on stone but it turned out to be sand, and now water was lapping at their feet.

It was the same sand that had once been the tops of mountains, with not even a scar in the sky to mark where the mountains had been: sand being swept down Poplar Creek to Tishomingo Creek, where it would join with the larger Red Bluff Creek before being carried into the Mississippi—and Bonnie, with her new husband and new family, wanted out, while Maxine wanted to hold on even more fiercely, while Jim Ed didn't care one way or the other. He would be all right; all he needed was his deep voice.

Radio would soon be completely secondary to television in its ability to grip men and women's souls and hold them fixed and captive to whatever message was being delivered, and country music would soon become a distant second to rock-and-roll. One man, their friend, would see to that—he had found his path and was hurrying toward it. The Browns were growing older, too, aged by the road—Maxine was nearing thirty-two!—but most damning of all to their engagement with fame, the country was beginning to awaken from its self-willed trance, was beginning to stir to a boil. The country didn't want to sleep any longer.

Still, just before sleep went away, there was fame. They were still churning out hits: everything they put out went to gold or almost gold, and then silver, and then almost silver, and so on. They were sinking but pretended not to know it. Bonnie was as secretly delighted by the sensation of sinking as Maxine was terrified.

Always, they were just one big song away from recovery.

The record companies, which were all venturing into television now, were awash with advertising money, and were forever throwing release parties, as were the powerful radio stations, owners of the sky itself, with each independent disc jockey determining who received airtime and who didn't.

There was booze at the parties, and not only had Maxine become practiced at drinking a lot, she was becoming accustomed to tossing her drinks in other people's faces at even the slightest provocation. It was something a woman could do to a man to signify to everyone else at the party that the man had been disrespectful, boorish, even insulting, and Maxine wasn't shy about slinging the sticky liquor in anyone's face, might even by this time have been looking for opportunities to do so. Steaming receptions in little cinder-block low-wattage radio stations, attended mostly by men but also by a few women, and the scent of spilled alcohol rife in the small rooms from such tossings, and innocent bystanders sometimes catching the brunt of her rage, men's jackets and shirtfronts dashed with it, the scent of aged cigarette smoke cloaking the linings of their throats and burrowing into their lungs.

Bonnie wanted out. She had Brownie at home and two little daughters now. One of her smaller pastures was bounded by stone walls, and chickens ranged freely in the yard. Blue smoke curled from her chimney in the fall and winter, and on her drive back home each time, she would see neighbor women out in their gardens, weeding or harvesting, or out in the verdant fields of springtime, walking through the pastures with battered metal feed buckets in their hands, dairy cattle following close behind. Giant sheaf-stacked mountains of hay gleamed and glinted in the sun in the middle of such pastures, casting smooth, rounded shadows.

Maxine missed her children, too, but not like Bonnie. There is no right or wrong to greatness—there is only the forward movement of it, and those who possess the most of it are the least in control of it.

Chet Atkins avoided such parties like the plague. He didn't judge anyone who attended them, but he stayed home, guarded his time, worked in his studio, played music quietly by himself, or hung out with his family. Far down in Maxine's treasure chest, there is a photo of Chet Atkins from around the time of the Browns' incandescent ascent. He is sitting in the control room on one side of the soundproof glass, a cup of coffee at his side, and is staring across at the Browns, who are in the midst of a recording session. The three Browns are gathered around the mike, leaning in and hitting their note, their faces pure and clean and illuminated in that moment, caught perfectly in the space of what the world most wants them to do.

Atkins is back in the shadows. Countless times he had been over on the other side of that glass, playing, but in this photo he is recording, and the look on his face, which some might describe as simply attentive, is so much more than that.

It is the look of a man who has captured something he cares deeply about—there is almost guilt in his expression, at witnessing the object of his affection and admiration. It is an image of one of the rarest yet most natural things in the world, greatness attracted to greatness, greatness coming in contact with greatness.

Jim Reeves went down in a plane crash. He should have known better. Maxine is still angry about it, half a century later. He should have done the math, should have counted how many stars back then had plane crashes—a reverse kind of effluorescing, sparks rising but then tumbling.

He had gotten his pilot's license and his own little plane. Maxine was supposed to have gone up with him that day. He had been badgering her to go over to Arkansas with him to look at some property he wanted to buy for an investment. They were going to stay for the weekend. They weren't romantically involved—he was still married to Mary—he just wanted some company with one of his old touring partners. Maxine had plenty of spare time by that point; they both did. She had even found a babysitter.

She was all set to go, and then at the last second, she wouldn't: Alicia got sick. Jim Reeves tried to get her to go anyway, said to bring Alicia and they'd find a doctor up in Arkansas. He was all but summoning her, with the greatest urgency he was capable of, but in the end, she hesitated, anchored by a stronger force. It wasn't her time yet. She wanted to go, but didn't. She stayed home and took her child to the doctor.

Alicia was better the next day, and Maxine, Jim Ed, and Bonnie got in the car the day after that and headed out to Dallas, where they had gotten an increasingly rare gig to appear on
The Big D Jamboree.
They were driving through the middle of the night—it was cooler that way—and they always tried to wait to leave until after the children had fallen asleep. They were driving and listening to
The Ralph Emery Show
out of Baton Rouge when Ralph Emery came on the air between songs and said that there was sad news in the world of country music, that another great musician's plane was missing and presumed to have crashed.

They all three fell silent. Jim Ed was driving, and all they could hear was the wind coming in through the open windows. They had already completely forgotten about Jim Reeves going up to Arkansas. He just wasn't on their mind that way, but then Ralph Emery started playing a song of Jim's, "Night Rider," and they knew.

Jim Ed pulled over to the side of the road. All three of them were weeping. There wasn't any other traffic out. They got out of the car and collapsed against one another there on the shoulder of the road, gravel on their knees, the stars bright around them, moths swarming the headlights, and the crickets still chirping like nothing had happened.

The radio said they hadn't found his plane. They held out a little hope. In their hearts they knew he was gone, but they pretended he wasn't. They didn't know whether to push on or turn around and go back home. They drove through the night to Dallas, crying, while the radio played Jim's songs all night. They got almost all the way to Dallas by daylight, checked in at a little hotel just outside the city limits, and slept until about noon, then got up and went in to the coliseum to dress and rehearse.

No one had heard anything yet and everybody was asking if the plane had been found.

When Maxine remembers that time, she doesn't know why they went ahead and did the show. It was just a stupid show. There was some discussion among the three of them, and a phone call to Mary, that maybe it was what Jim would have wanted them to do. It certainly wasn't any fun, and though they sounded all right and got another standing ovation, and everyone was glad they were there to worry together, the Browns just wanted to get back home. They finished the show and drove all the way back to Nashville that same night. They got there at daylight and all went up in the hills with the volunteers who were looking for his plane.

Someone found it that day at noon. It had crashed on approach in a thunderstorm, had gone down only a mile from Jim Ed's house. That part really bothered them, wondering if he'd known where he was and was trying to bring it down close to someplace where he might be able to get help. Gone forever, at the age of forty-one. It had seemed old to them, back then.

It just got harder to keep going after that. Mary Reeves became unhinged. She cut off all contact with her friends and moved out to the desert in New Mexico, where she kept an increasing number of cats for companionship, trying to halt her slide, but there could be no halting it: they had all risen too far too fast and now had to pay the price in the falling, while the rest of the country listened to the steady, smooth crooning music and never knew a thing, never dreamed of either the ecstasy or the agony.

The life in the desert didn't heal her—the searing heat and light might have bought her some time, but it didn't heal her. She ended up needing help in an assisted living facility, a sanatorium, that tended to her basic daily needs.

It all went by pretty quick,
Maxine thinks, and wonders for the ten thousandth time why she alone was left, and why she has traveled the journey unharmed and untouched.
I am unharmed,
she thinks.
I have remained untouched.

S
HE HAS A THREE-DAY
wait before Jefferson Eads returns. She's been on the phone with Bonnie and has left messages for Jim Ed, who's out on the road. Bonnie is mildly interested, though when Maxine describes the filmmaker as a nice young man, Bonnie's thinking grad school or maybe even a little older. Bonnie doesn't volunteer to come down; it's midsummer, the height of gardening season.

Jefferson Eads is all business when he returns, no chitchat—he doesn't want to sit and have any tea with her, though he does eat a couple of the cookies. Maxine's a little disappointed by how antisocial he is—how driven, almost brusque—but she quickly adapts her mood to his:
business.

He has a little notepad on which he's sketched various scenes—places he wants her to be, things he wants her to be doing. She's not a gardener, but he wants footage of her digging a hole in the backyard, and is almost cross with her when he discovers that she doesn't even own a shovel. He won't take no for an answer, and he leaves her there in the kitchen with her tea and a plateful of cookies and hurries next door to the neighbors, whose names Maxine can't quite remember, and returns shortly with the prop he needs.

He works her hard that morning, using up all the good in her and then some, positioning her just so against the morning light, then repositioning her, and yet again: forcing her to walk back and forth, doing the same minor take over and over again, neither praising nor criticizing her, simply directing her to repeat the same thing with only the most minor of variations, and with Maxine wearing down quickly.

None of this is what I signed on for,
she thinks.
Be careful what you ask for.
But time and again she answers the bell and does whatever he asks with as much energy as she can bring.

"Why would an old woman with a walker be out digging a hole?" she asks him at one point—the late-morning sun is above the trees, beating down hard, stirring the floaters in her vision—and Jefferson Eads does not have an answer, but pushes her to do it again, though he gives her a break, lets her hobble over to the shade and sit down in a folding chair to catch her breath while he pans the camera all around the yard, filming what now looks like a battlefield for gophers.

"This was not in my life," she says, and he sighs and tells her that it's important to him, it's what the film books call metaphor, though when she asks him for what, he purses his lips and says, "We'll have to see."

"It's my life," she says, "and my movie, I deserve to know."