Nashville Chrome (8 page)

As if for all of the short seventeen years beforehand he had just been treading water, waiting—not unlike Fabor, though with a good heart, if a wounded one—to come straight to them, brush against them, take from them what he could, and continue on, possibly without even knowing he had taken anything.

For Elvis, it must surely have been like something from a dream, in which the sleepwalker does not question his or her route but is drawn and moves easily, traveling not with ambition, for once, but with only the milder things for a while, such as hope and curiosity.

If anyone were to ask him about it afterward, he would certainly not have described his approach like that of a moth to a light but would instead have said that he was simply pulled by the scent of Birdie's cooking. He was whistling as he walked, guitar strapped to his back, walking up the dirt road carpeted with the soft straw of pine needles, as if such fronds had been laid on the road in advance and expectation of his arrival, though there was no such expectation, it was only a day like all others, with chicken being fried and pies being baked.

Mourning doves called lazily from the tops of pine trees and fluttered in pockets of sand or red clay worn down to the finest powder, taking baths. Grasshoppers clacked. Elvis was just walking, maybe knowing he was stepping into history, maybe not. Maybe just hungry. Seventeen years old. Still essentially just a boy, whistling. His old car out of gas. Walking, ostensibly to look for nightclubs where he could play, or churches—he had it vaguely in mind that he wanted to be a gospel singer—but mostly just walking, and moving, as best as he could tell, toward the odor of that chicken frying, and the rolls baking, and the pies cooling on the windowsills.

Walking right on through that curtain. Maybe he was dimly aware, or maybe he was still unknowing, just hungry, always hungry. Maxine and Bonnie and Jim Ed's mother's restaurant just right up the road: the exquisite timing of history. Early spring. He could see the restaurant coming into view. Surely he had no idea what awaited him. Surely he was just out walking. Maybe daydreaming about fame a little, but not overly much.

He saw the light-bulb silhouettes of the three young musicians—unignited in the daylight like that, they appeared unprepossessing, but he was intrigued by the garish possibility of the display, and delighted to imagine what it looked like at night. Seeing it, something in him calmed and became centered, almost as if he had found a lost sibling.

Birdie had just finished the last of the breakfast menu. There were still a few cathead biscuits left, and the cream gravy, with its flecks of bacon and chunks of ham, was still warm if not steaming—not yet chilled to the consistency of pudding—and now she was starting the lunch menu, whacking the chickens (which she had killed and cleaned only the day before) into pieces for frying, the cleaver striking the ancient chopping block with reassuring authority: a sound he remembered from Tupelo. After disassembling the chickens and heating the frying oil (dropping a match onto the surface of the oil and waiting for the tip to ignite), she dipped the chicken pieces into a bowl of egg and buttermilk, then into a sack filled with flour and red pepper and salt, and shook it to coat them. Then she put the chicken, still in its sack, back into the refrigerator—one of her many secrets—and set about peeling and slicing potatoes, also for frying, her big knotted hands working the little knife as deftly as any banjo player's worked his instrument.

The pies were already made, some late the night before and others first thing that morning, long before sunup. Strawberries canned from summer, blackberry, rhubarb, apple, lemon meringue.

"Do you have chocolate, ma'am?" he asked when he came into the restaurant. As polite a set of manners as she had ever seen, and something else, too. He introduced himself, though back then the name didn't mean anything. It was the last time it would mean nothing. She didn't know any Presleys. She didn't make chocolate pie every day, but she had made some that morning, they were not yet even fully chilled.

"You can't start with pie," she said. "Pie is for dessert." She eyed his back-slung guitar case, his shoulder bag with its one change of clothes, the sandy pants cuffs and dusty shoes. "Have you even had breakfast today?" His old belt was cinched beyond its last hole, nail-riven new holes stippling it; but not a whiff of depression or sadness that day, nothing but joy, possessing no idea, really, what he was walking into. Maybe having a little idea, a vague picture, of the general size of the fame he desired—the fame roughly, or so he would have guessed, commensurate with the size of his appetite, which sometimes thrilled him and other times frightened him.

He would know the fame when he saw it. But of the inexplicable and damning sadness that would one day begin to roughly parallel it, he had no clue whatsoever.

"No, ma'am," he said. "But I sure would like some pie."

Occasionally she could get the sense that one of them might be worth something. But that first time, she had no real sense that he would be any different. She didn't even ask him to play. She just fed him, brought him his pie, and then all the rest. She thought it strange how already and immediately he seemed to view her as a mother, but such a thing did not displease her.

"Are those your children, ma'am?" he asked. "Are they singers?" Adjusting his guitar strap, the instrument still strapped to his back.

They became fast friends. They played music together, but also played like children. On occasions when Fabor did not have Jim Reeves and the Browns booked, the Browns would tour with Elvis, if it could be called touring, drifting and wandering to whatever club would have them. Playing for fun and essentially playing for free: working below radar to keep from having to hassle with Fabor. Sometimes a club owner would fill their cars with gas, would get their hotel rooms, would buy them drinks.

The girls would line up all night outside Jim Ed's and Elvis's rooms, some nights a dozen or more, as if waiting in line for a sale to open at a department store. Ten, fifteen minutes a girl, and Elvis and Jim Ed never sticking his head out the door to see how long the line might be, or exercising any real form of quality control—just grinding on until he could go no more, the girls outside fighting one another to cut in line.

***

It was as if already they had two lives. The boys would engage in their all-night revelry, breeding away like bulls, too amped up from the performance to sleep or in any way descend from their high spirits—while Bonnie and Maxine would hole up in their room and talk about the show and engage in catty comments about the harlots.

Sometimes they would watch television, an utter novelty to them, and other times they would listen to the radio loudly while Elvis and Jim Ed thundered on in the adjacent rooms. Sometimes they would read or write letters; sometimes they would drink. Always, by that point, they would think about fame and would remember the applause.

The girls didn't get to sleep around. That was the boys' task, the boys' duty. Bonnie didn't want to—was saving herself for marriage—and Maxine, though she wanted to, didn't, mostly just because she wasn't supposed to. More smoldering. So much waiting. Still believing she had a hand in this matter of her life—in any of it.

In the morning the party-life would be gone entirely, passing like a wonderful storm for the boys, and they would all four reconvene for breakfast, bleary-eyed and wrung out, but filling back up, the well recharging from what was surely a limitless reservoir.

Did Maxine and Bonnie want their own partners, as enduring and steadfast as were the boys' liaisons fleeting? Bonnie, certainly; Maxine, less so. By that point she would bury any ten lovers if it helped her get more of the drug she needed. She told Bonnie she was "horny as a two-peckered billy goat," but her real hunger was for something far below.

Was it her fault that she was that way, or anyone's fault that two sisters of the same parents could be so different? There was no right or wrong in it. It was all only an elemental force blowing through them. It was all requisite for the world to turn as it turned.

In the beginning, Maxine and Bonnie started out riding home in the back seat, with Jim Ed and Elvis up front. After a few months that would change—one day Elvis and Bonnie would be in the back, tender and quiet and shy, almost as if it was not courtship at all, but as if Elvis were simply doing Maxine a favor, letting her have the more comfortable seat up front, or as if Elvis himself were seeking a more comfortable seat. And then after a little while longer, the new dynamics came to seem just as they should be, and Elvis and Bonnie did not need to be so quiet and serious, were laughing more in the back seat, not as if either or both or any of them were going to change the world in any way but instead as if they were just kids.

As they drove through the Arkansas springtime, breeze-blown dogwood blossoms lined the roads like flowers tossed at a wedding. They gunned the car up the hills, gliding down the back side, gravel loose under their thin tires, their guitars stacked in the trunk, in need of retuning after every stop, and the memory of the last show and the applause wrapping them like a warmed blanket on an otherwise chilly day. The spring sunlight flashed through the windshield, the windows rolled down despite the mountain chill, the boys smoking cigarettes. They were all four, back then, passionate about music—Elvis was only just beginning to let go of his dream of becoming a famous gospel singer, was just starting to get an inkling of what rock-and-roll was, and where it could take him.

On the drives back home they would stop and picnic in out-of-the-way places. A little waterfall with mossy limestone caves, beside which bloomed purple and gold violets. A meadow where wild turkeys gobbled back in the shadows while the Browns and Elvis spread a blanket to sit on and fixed sandwiches from bread that Birdie had baked for them and sliced ham from a hog Floyd had killed and butchered and smoked.

A cold beer each for the boys. Bonnie laughing, demurring again when offered one; Maxine taking a sip of Elvis's, however, then a sip from Jim Ed's, before opening her own bottle.

The four of them napping afterward in the lengthening slants of sun. Waking up a little later and playing some music. The distances were not too great, back then, and their calendars were not overly scheduled. There was still plenty of time to get back home, and back then, they all four still knew the way.

I
T'S THE LITTLE
things she remembers best. Helping Bonnie with her makeup in the incredibly tense moments before a show. The simple pleasure of practicing; the first perfect chord from Jim Ed once the guitar was tuned. The brief and tiny space between banter and earnestness when they first leaned in and announced themselves, and released their voices, each time: an action like stepping across a little stream, a stream so small as to be crossed entirely with but one step.

The glances of respect whenever she first entered a room of her peers back in those days. Even if someone didn't like her or approve of the Browns' sound, there was this certain quick look she saw them give her. It was always there, even at the corner of her vision, and she was reassured by it, as might be a woman who, in checking her appearance in a mirror, sees that everything is just as she wishes it to be and has no need to adjust anything.

Best of all, of course, the stages: in London and Frankfurt, in Hot Springs and Nacogdoches, in Memphis, New Orleans, Knoxville, Nashville, Savannah, and Jackson. The particular pleasure of a new stage, the flooring unfamiliar, and the curve of walls and arc of roof likewise not yet known. The strangest details impressing themselves upon her, in that heightened state of awareness, that hyperacuity, as the adrenaline began to burn and the pupils constricted. Noticing a bat-shaped swirl in the growth rings of the oak flooring beneath her feet, or a dent in the steel mesh of the waiting microphone. The usher in Fayetteville who looked so much like Floyd, with his red jacket and slicked-back white hair. The WPA mural of John Henry on the high wall of the Cactus Theater in Lubbock. Her heart terrified, beating a million times a minute as she wondered what the audience would be like, wondering,
Will they love us?
Terrified, and grateful to her brother and sister beside her, as she stepped forward to find out.

Of the time that ensued once the lights came on her and the applause began all memory leaves her, if ever it was in her in the first place. Unconscious, owned, possessed, they sang, moved through their repertoire unthinking, giving themselves over to the audience with a complete selflessness.

What she does remember, beyond the first shine of the lights, is the end: the thing she lived for, the moment of perfect stillness when, after the last note had fallen upon the audience and was still settling over them, loosening, spreading out and then disappearing, there was the sweet and hallowed space in which the audience, saturated and bewitched, realized the songs were over but, entranced as they were, could not yet quite lift their hands to clap.

It was almost like a moment of confusion, as if the audience had been caught deep in some middle place between the dreaming and the waking and did not want to leave, though finally, like divers surfacing, came back up to the top, reluctantly at first, but gradually and—as if realizing only then where they were—enthusiastically.

Those full three or four seconds of silence, and the delight of her terror—
What if they do not clap at all? What if they do not rise to their feet?
—were more powerful than anything she had ever known.

Only when it did come—the first few waves of applause, then the sea roar, and then the rising—would she relax a tiny bit, and glance over at her brother and sister. The three of them somehow closer, out there on the stage, than they ever were in so-called real life. Relaxing, finally, after so long a wait and so long a journey, for a short period, before winding up tight all over again on their way to the next show, next audience, next state.