Nashville Chrome (30 page)

Birdie died a few months later, further into their rebound, their swooping recovery. The world loved them again, all was briefly as it had been before, and Birdie never knew of their turmoil, their plans to abandon their blessing and their curse.

They came home, buried her, broken further inside—there is no such thing as a fully balanced family, the harmonies yearned for within can only be accomplished for brief moments, which then burn bright in the remembering—and then they went back out on the road, following the same paths as before, paths they had made and which they were now trying to extend just a little more, orphans who knew in their hearts they had been loved deeply, but who wanted more.

J
EFFERSON EADS HAS
been busy, viewing and cataloging the rough cuts of his film over and over. The quantification, the inventory of every external item in his world, soothes him; from order comes control, and he is no longer uneasy.

He's not always uneasy. At many points in the day he knows a great peace, sometimes earned through his work and other times descending on him like the weather, not generated through his own efforts but bestowed from afar, and unrequested, like grace.

Other times, however, it's as if a switch flips, and his agitation comes not from all the external factors he seeks to know and control, but from within. There is a disynchrony between him and the world, one that can only be calmed by numbers and their smooth, intricate, dependable precision: the way they always interlock and balance, no matter how challenging the enumeration may seem, or how difficult the equation. An equity can always be obtained, and once it is, no further changes can occur: the problem is balanced, and in that balance, the problem is controlled.

Whenever he is focused on one problem, he stays with it until it is solved, working through his agitation and unknown fear until the end; and when the problem is solved, he knows a deeper and more satisfying peace, one that cannot be gotten any other way than through his committed labor, and the feeling of control and relief is as sweet and powerful as it is brief.

Some of the other children in his school pity him his isolation and eccentricity, which seem to them to be willful, a rejection of the homogeneity toward which the others aspire and labor, and that therefore he is deserving of their ridicule and abuse—though there are not as many of these kinds of children as might be imagined.

Some, as the world begins to open before them, are beginning to realize they're a little afraid of him; not that he would alarm them, but simply afraid of what they're just beginning to understand might be an almost limitless depth, a bottomless difference—that already he knows and does things that they will never be able to. As if in his genius he has purposely chosen to distance himself from them, choosing his mind over their companionship.

He doesn't have any friends. This is not unprecedented in the other children's experience, but what is unique is that he doesn't seem to want one. He's not just pretending; he is happier when he is alone, reading up on whatever his next subject of inquiry might happen to be. Rockets, paleontology, military history, it doesn't matter; every few months, he sets up an encampment in a new land, usually one of the hard sciences, and then inhabits that territory with the commitment of a new lover.

He is happier when he is alone, or if not alone, safely distant from all others. The people he tolerates best are the ones who don't try to get too close to him. Often these are individuals who are either focused on themselves or do not want him around. It's complicated and entirely neurological, and he understands that he is different, and understands why, and accepts himself the way he is, and is grateful to have his intellect.

Later in his school career—and soon—his classmates will get over both their teasing and their fear and will accept him as he has accepted himself, and will come to take a huge pride in him, and will come in some ways to think of him as their captain. But not quite yet. Right now, they are mostly afraid, and he knows this, though it does not touch him, exists instead only at the perimeters of his consciousness. He perceives and understands that other people are concerned with what people think of them, but that simply isn't his world.

What it feels like to him sometimes is that he is in the service of another master, one whom he cannot see and about whom he knows precious little yet seeks to approach. Some master who lies far below, and whom—if only enough knowledge can be gained—can one day finally be met, and the master's power and essence more fully ascertained. It was a surprisingly long time before his parents realized more fully the nature of his gifts: his hunger for the facts, his insistence on being precise. For a long time they considered their love for him as being only their own special perspective, distanced from the world's; it was not until he was four or five that they began to understand that the indulgence of their perceptions was actually accurate, and that if anything, they had underestimated things. His recollections of all events and utterances was profound, as was his capacity to connect facts and in that manner proceed further into the depths of knowledge.

They would not have classified him as a loving child, but again, the indulgence of their own love for him made that disparity insignificant; they protected him with it, sent him out into the world with it, and though they knew the odds were long that he would change the world, they knew without a doubt that the world would not change him whatsoever, and that in that obstinate fixity, there was rarity and beauty, as there was in their own acceptance of that fact.

His mother, Louise, had been a schoolteacher for a few years before retiring; his father, Brad, managed a construction company. He, Jefferson, could have come from anywhere: he was as sudden and remarkable as their own lives had been unremarkable.

He and his mother had been shopping at the Piggly Wiggly when he had seen Maxine's note. He had been standing off by himself while she pushed her cart up the aisles. There had been nothing about the note that would have given any clue as to its provenance with greatness—no syntax or diction, or even, really, any boldness—but he had gone straight to it, had been standing there in his own reverie, looking up at the bulletin board while his mother shopped. Out of boredom, he had been mentally arranging and cataloging all the various hand-lettered postings, inventorying them by subject and their chronology, but no matter how he looked at the board, to him there had been no question. The small blue note might as well have been illuminated: somehow, he recognized it for what it was and was drawn straight toward it, with the same assurance and certainty with which he addressed all of his decisions.

The bonds of his affinity for such shared isolation, and such gift or talent, were as invisible as those of any other affinity—the call to shared companionship between two lifelong friends or the unseen but irrefutable bonds between hydrogen and oxygen, or mother and daughter, father and daughter—and he stood there for a long time beneath the note, comforted simply by being in its presence.

To have been so unremarkable in their accomplishments—and so lacking in notoriety of any sort—his parents were remarkable in other ways. They had learned to support wholeheartedly his ventures, whatever they turned out to be. They had learned to trust him and his place in the world.

Jefferson Eads returns five days later, with a clipboard, a storyboard, in hand. He informs her that her task that day is to go back to the grocery store—films her palsied efforts, successful at least one more time, to get the car backed out of the garage and onto the sunlit street, and then, like a great schooner setting out on the most intrepid of journeys, off into the heart of traffic. With some humor, amazement, fear, and grim satisfaction, he films the near misses, and the faces of the other motorists.

Everything he's filming is from the
now,
which makes Maxine uneasy; she wants to tell about the glory days. Even though it's a documentary, she wants young people to dress up and reenact the good years, though simplifying the journey—omitting the depression and alcoholism, which she has not told him about. "Couldn't you do a regular movie, too?" she asks. "Don't you know some young people you could cast as us?"

Jefferson shakes his head. "No," he says, "actually, I don't have many associates. It's just you and me. I do have some ideas, though."

She listens carefully, thrilled by his attention. All she had to do was wait; her every wish has always been delivered to her.

Totally unselfconscious, Jefferson Eads films her shopping: the slow hitch of the walker, her clumsiness with the frozen foods. The cold brick of a chicken slips from her grasp and skitters across the linoleum like a hockey puck rapped sharply across the ice. The rock-hard bird slides into a stacked display of soup cans, crumples the pyramid with the efficiency of a bowling ball striking tenpins, and the expression on Maxine's face when she looks back to see if the camera is rolling is one of guilt tinged with confusion.

How is this a movie about greatness?
she wonders, and wants to quit—not just the movie, but everything.

To his credit, Jefferson Eads puts his camera down after the chaos has come to a rest, and he picks the chicken up and puts it in Maxine's cart, then begins restacking the soup cans. He holds one up and asks if she wants one.

What passes for trivia or minutiae in the lives of others—bonds so hair thin as to be irrelevant, utterly insignificant—are sometimes as strong as a bond gets, for him: as if too much electricity flows through him along some circuits and almost none at all—just a sporadic trickle—in others. For him, this is one of his bonding moments, or as close as he gets to such things: helping an old lady.

It's new territory for him; it was not his instinctive reaction. It was almost as if he had to analyze the situation, watch himself watching her, and then direct himself to offer assistance, in the manner that he would direct a character in one of his short films to block into a certain position.

He did it, though, and now he feels the faintest shimmering of electricity along those unused pathways. For him, the trickle might as well be a roar, and the two previously separate and unrelated elements are merged, the pleasure of reassembling the disorganized soup cans and his relationship with Maxine: the kindness in his heart finding some outlet. He's grateful to her for giving him that opportunity. Sometimes his coldness is a little like being in a jail.

On the way out, he stops and films her bulletin board note, which is still posted, and now it's her turn to bond a little further with him, and to give him what is her own rarest thing, trust.

"Do you want to take it down," Jefferson asks, "now that you've got a movie being made?"

Maxine hesitates, playing the odds, and with some effort, decides it's better to have his full enthusiasm than to wish for another. "Yes, you can take it down."

And again Jefferson Eads feels new warmth, electricity flowing through new places in his mind, the river current of it a little wider, and a little wilder.
This is what life is like,
he thinks.
It's enough to make you set down your camera.
It's not common, but it's fine enough to go hunting for it, and to wait, again and again, for such pleasure's return.

They make it back to her house unscathed. Maxine uses the opportunity of having Jefferson Eads along with her and stops at the gas station to fill her car. A full tank will last another six months.
What will my condition be then?
she wonders. She hands Jefferson the money and he pumps the gas.

He's so useful to have around! In a way he's far better than Buddy. She feels a warmth in her old heart that is not unlike how it was when she was drinking, but this is better. It's similar, in that it makes her want more, but it's better, in that a little is better than nothing. Which is not how it was with the bottle.

They go back into her treasure chest room and he films her unearthing more memorabilia, explaining to the camera the significance of each ancient artifact. A poster from a show with Elvis, signed by the King. A locket given to her by Johnny Cash. Jefferson Eads burns through another memory card, and at the bottom of the chest, she pulls out a nondescript cassette in a generic plastic case. The small rectangle is hand-lettered in red marker, "John Lennon—The Three Bells," and is dated December 8, 1980.

"His widow sent it to me," Maxine says. "It was the last thing he recorded. He was playing around in the studio, did this, then walked outside and got shot."

Jefferson Eads watches her face as she speaks. He's filming, is holding the camera under one arm as if it's a football, and he watches her face for a clue as to what he should be feeling.

He knows that John Lennon was a big deal, was one of the Beatles, and he senses dimly that this is a very sad event, but that part of his brain just isn't firing, isn't blossoming with the illumination, the gold light of sorrow. Still, he detects something like regret—something he can't quite identify—in Maxine's countenance, and he decides to take a chance.

"That's sad," he says carefully, and for a moment he thinks he's guessed wrong, because Maxine's expression doesn't change, her reverie remains intact.

"Yes," she says finally, "it is," though Jefferson is confused, because it seems to him she might be referring to something or someone else.

They take the tape into the front room and she plays it for him. There's not much to it—the banter, the quick confident warm-up chords, and then suddenly Lennon's into the song, rocking out, singing about Little Jimmy Brown and a valley in France—and then someone walks into the studio and interrupts him.

We were all interrupted,
Maxine thinks. She is the only one who has gone the whole distance, and then beyond.

"Do you want me to dig any more holes?" she asks. She's not joking, is resigned to the gauntlet through which she must pass to regain the center of fame, and would rather get the digging out of the way sooner than later, while she still has a few shreds of energy left.