The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  I had followed the couple walking in front of me as they headed towards the sound of music echoing in the buildings along the street.

  “What we have here is a musical wonder,” the man called Stu Farmer said as I hurried towards his husky amplified voice to join the crowd standing around an elevated platform in the small park beside Portage Avenue. “My little partner has been playing the guitar ever since he was knee-high to a grasshopper and he ain’t much bigger now. Sat on the floor beside my guitar when he was only two years old and started strumming the heck outa it just as easy as eating apple pie. I thought old Chet himself had dropped by for a visit. When the boy comes out here to play, I want you to pay attention. You’re gonna hear something downright amazing. So get ready! Ladies and gents, let’s give this cowpoke the welcome he deserves! Welcome Stu Farmer Junior!” He flung his fringed arm in the direction of the blue curtain strung up behind him on the stage.

  “Well, well, well,” I heard someone say and then I felt a man step up to my side. From the corner of my eye I saw grey flannel. A grey suit. The man stood beside me and made a church steeple of his hands, tapping his index fingers together. The curtain on the stage billowed suddenly and a woman’s voice rose up from behind it, pleading. Stu Farmer chuckled. “Come on out here, son. Ain’t a thing in the world that’ll bite you.” He leaned across his guitar and winked. “Unlike his pappy, he’s a bit on the shy side, folks.” The crowd tittered in appreciation and watched the curtain. Traffic in the street slowed down as people leaned from windows to catch a glimpse of what was happening on the stage, which had been set up in the centre of the park among rectangles of flower-beds.

  A woman who was later introduced as Loretta, Stu Farmer’s wife, pushed through the opening in the curtain with her back to us and dragged Stu Farmer Junior onto the stage. A tall, sandy-haired man stepped out behind him and sauntered off to one side of it. He grinned at us and tipped his Stetson to the back of his head. This was Hank, the man I would meet again not too many years later. Junior, a shy teenage boy, wore a gold satin shirt identical to his father’s, and a white Stetson. He flinched when he saw the crowd and his chin dropped to his chest. Loretta nudged him and he bowed. When he straightened, his Stetson dropped low over his forehead. He looked off to one side, as though concentrating on something happening in the wings.

  “I’ve been telling the folks here about how you can play two songs at once on your guitar. That true, son? You haven’t been putting us on, have yuh?” The Stetson said no. “Well, let’s do it then. Let’s play for the good folks out there.”

  “That’s right, son,” murmured the tall man in the grey suit who stood beside me. “You can do it, son. The people of the plains who till the soil, they plant, they hope, and they do not surrender. Whether the forces of nature destroy their years’ work, their life work, or when world events …” I glanced up. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he paused to swallow saliva. Grey whiskers glinted among the soft folds of his jowls. I stepped away and threaded in deeper among the crowd, working my way closer to the front. When I turned and looked back it was to confirm what I already knew. It was John Diefenbaker. He stood among the crowd, smiling strangely, his head wobbling from side to side as though he was agreeing with everything and everyone around him.

  “You ready now, son?” Stu Farmer asked. “Well come on, let’s do it then.” A-one, two. Their feet stomped, hands flashed against strings, and music flowed from their instruments. “Yankee doodle went to town,” they played for several moments, and then they keyed up and began playing another song, which the couple began to sing, “Home on the Range.” They harmonized in a fake mournful tone over their son’s head. Then their instruments fell silent and Junior continued to play. He lifted his head and his gaze grew fixed on the air above us as he concentrated, as though reading from an invisible score. “Yankee doodle went to town, riding on a pony.” I heard the words in his strings. As I listened, I heard another melody emerge at the same time. “Where nary was heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day.” The people grew still. I glanced back and saw John D’s head wobbling and his mouth moving as he recited the words to the song.

  The boy played for several minutes and then, as he neared the end of the performance, he became impatient to be finished and the melodies blended together. He bowed and stepped to the back of the stage.

  People clapped and several turned from the stage, about to leave, while others shifted sideways to the edge in order to politely slip away. Stu Farmer grabbed the microphone. “Say folks,” he said. “If you have to go, I understand. But if you can stick around you’ll see that we’ve been saving the best for the last. What you’re about to see and hear would make my grandpappy roll over in his grave. Heh, heh, heh. Rock and roll, that is.” He nodded at the other musicians. A-one, two, one, two, three, four. Their feet began to stomp again, and then their instruments jumped with the rock and roll beat. Junior played with them, a little smirk pulling at one corner of his mouth. The curtain parted and a skinny, young, pimply-faced man leapt to centre stage. The sequins on his bolero jacket sparkled in the sun as he swung his arms, and his legs scissored back and forth in time to the beat. His black hair shone as though it was wet and his squared-off sideburns appeared to be painted on halfway down the sides of his narrow face. The musical introduction ended and he froze in position, legs splayed, pelvis thrust forward. In the slight pause that followed I heard a snuffling sound as Stu Farmer Junior ducked his head. Laughing, I realized.

  “Ladies and gents, boys and girls. I kid you not, straight from Nashville, I give you Elvis the Pelvis Presley!”

  I was startled when the women around me shrieked. Several men shoved their hands into their pockets or stared at their shoes, refusing to look at the gyrating performer. “Elvis Pretzel, you mean,” someone said sardonically. “A friggin’ impersonator. No way they’d get that guy to come up here.” I watched as Junior began to edge to the back of the stage. He grinned and winked at Hank. Then he glanced up and our eyes met. He smiled, shy, and put a finger against his mouth, the gesture saying, “Don’t tell anyone.” Then he backed through the curtain and disappeared.

  As I left the crowd, people streamed past me towards the stage, coming out from the houses bordering the park, some running, others doing a little jive in time to the music. I saw Junior sitting on a picnic table at the back of the park, which, I noticed, was in a square bordered by houses and apartment blocks on three sides. Spirals of water twisted outwards above freshly mowed lawns. As I approached Junior I heard reedy music. I dropped to my haunches beside a tree. He was bent over a mouth organ and a bluesy bit of jazz echoed in his cupped palm. Then the music broke off as he lifted his head, swung his legs up and over the table, and swivelled around to face me.

  “Hi.” He whacked spit from his instrument. “You all enjoyed the show?” His eyebrows were like black wings flaring up with his question.

  “It was okay.”

  He laughed. “It was a piece of dogey doo doo, you mean.” He began to play a jazzed up version of “Heartbreak Hotel.” His voice had been soft, low, as though he was weary and didn’t like to expend the energy required to talk. I noticed a bottle jutting up between his legs. “You ever hear me play on the radio, kid?”

  “No.”

  “You ain’t missed a thing. Care for a little swig of porch-climber?” He held up the bottle.

  I shook my head no.

  He tipped the bottle, drank, and then set it down on the picnic table with a bang. “Come here, little kid. Come on. Ain’t nothing here’s going to bite you.”

  When I refused he slid down from the table and waved me over. “Come on! I just want you to stand beside me. I want to measure.”

  I got up and stood beside him. “Look. Top of your head is level with my ear, right?” The brim of his Stetson brushed against the side of my head. “I’m five foot two, but my eyes aren’t blue.” He laughed at his own joke.

  “Well, so how old are you?
Let me guess. Nine? Ten?”

  “Almost eleven,” I lied.

  He sighed. “Know how old I am, kid? Sixteen. But they don’t mind if people think I’m about twelve.” He plucked a cigarette from his shirt pocket, lit one, exhaled smoke while studying me. I noticed the shadow of whiskers beneath his stage make-up. “You come here alone? Think that’s a good idea?”

  “Ain’t nothing here’s going to bite me.”

  He laughed and reached for his guitar resting against the table. “Stick around.” His voice had lost its thin twangy sound and fake accent. “I’m going to play something. Just for you. This is the real show. Why don’t you hop up?” He patted the table.

  “It’s okay.” I went back and sat down beneath the tree, leaning against its trunk.

  He bent over his instrument as he played and I liked how his hair had been flattened by his Stetson, a band of dark hair shining with perspiration. “You live around here?” he asked.

  I told him the name of my town.

  “Really?” Again his black wing-like eyebrows shot up. “We’re going out that way. Near the end of summer. Me and my parents and Hank, if he can ever get it together. And Old Elvis there.” He laughed. “Doing a string of towns.”

  The singer’s voice echoed in the apartment blocks behind me, but as Junior stopped his wandering through the strings and began to play, his music dominated.

  He closed his eyes and his head dropped lower and lower until his pale cheek rested against his guitar. I stretched out on the grass and cradled my head, immersed in the exotic spiciness of music that seemed to flaunt its colours, boasting of a place where there was more than what I had. More than a two-tone flat landscape where people sang about cheating hearts or blue suede shoes. I closed my eyes, yearning to see it. Gradually the steady wind-sound of traffic streaming by on Portage Avenue, the voice of the man called Elvis, receded completely and Junior’s music remained at the centre.

  I was nine years old and my mind not yet cluttered with what might or might not be possible. I lay there, eyes closed, face turned into the damp grass, and, as in my dream of the previous night, saw myself floating in the air. I could do it, I knew. I could rise up, it was simply a matter of possessing the fierce desire. I tried. I imagined sparks shooting from my head in my intense concentration to move. Move, I urged my body. I clenched my teeth and my head buzzed with the pressure of it. Move, move. I had been struck by lightning, been subtracted, and I was light now, feet swift. And then it happened. I felt my body inch across the grass. I held my breath. I was moving! Slowly, but I felt the grass brush against my face as I moved forward, an inch, two, perhaps three, inches. I was moving without doing anything but willing it to happen! And then it stopped. I heard footsteps pounding in the ground beneath me, opened my eyes, and looked up the tall length of Hank.

  “Who’s the dopey kid?” he asked Stu Farmer Junior. Junior stopped playing. I sat up and the world rushed forward to meet me. “I want you to hear this. I’ve been working on it,” Hank said. Junior nodded. “Tell me what you think.” He began to play.

  “Ah, Hank Snow,” Junior said. Hank nodded and cleared his throat, opened his mouth, and then closed it again.

  “Come on, we’re waiting.”

  “Well, there’s –” Hank began to sing and then stopped to clear his throat again.

  “Ain’t nothing here’s gonna bite you,” Junior said.

  Hank grinned and began to sing a song about driving an eighteen-wheeler away from a woman who has broken his heart.

  When they return from the picnic, Margaret is upstairs in bed. They hear the soft scuff of her slippers as she hurries down to greet them. “I wasn’t sleeping, just having a wee lie-down,” she calls out to them, sounding like her mother, Grandmother Johnson. She steps out onto the veranda and they don’t recognize their mother at first. She’s pulled her wet hair straight back into a ponytail and her clean face looks younger, almost boyish. She wears Timothy’s blue-plaid housecoat. She smiles and crosses her arms against her chest and taps her foot. “What if I don’t let you in?” She laughs. Then she bounds towards them and unhooks the screen door. “I hope you’re as tired as I am.” She yawns. “And I hope you’re hungry too because I made sandwiches.”

  Amy notices how her voice doesn’t match her eyes, which veer towards the sky in search of a storm, the look of apprehension dawning. Humid air holds the smell of Carona on a Saturday evening: potatoes frying in butter, apple pies cooling on countertops for the Sunday after-church meal, nips and chips cooking in Sullie’s Drive In and Take Out outside of town.

  One by one they pass Margaret on the veranda. She smiles over their heads, not at them, and doesn’t wonder over the dirty footprint in the centre of Mel’s chest. Jill stops to wind her tanned arms around Margaret’s long white neck and kisses her ear. “I wore my hat all day.” She winces against the pain in her groin but she is careful not to limp.

  “Go on up and wash.” Margaret slaps each one playfully on the rump as they ascend the stairs. Her eyes embrace the image of her children in the dim light of the upstairs hallway, the square man-look of Mel’s maturing frame, the glint of gold in Jill’s dark rippling hair. Sparks of the sun clinging to it, she thinks. And then there’s the short-legged, stubby-bodied youngest child. Amy. The child she had ached for. And so unbearable had her longing been that she’d made the decision to stop using her diaphragm without Timothy knowing. An accident. It happens. The result: Amy. Obstinate, moody, too silent, always wanting to run before she walks. She has confessed to Timothy that she doesn’t understand this one. From the very beginning Amy struggled to be free of her embrace, preferring Timothy’s arms instead. She’s not like my other babies, Margaret had complained to Bunny. Not round, plump, and gurgling, eager to please with a smile. Amy had been born covered in downy black fur from the back of her neck to her buttocks, breasts enlarged and nipples oozing. She was not the Amelia Margaret had envisioned, a porcelain doll whom she would put in smocked dresses with lace collars. She was muscular, hard, and resisted Margaret at every turn. The daily bath routine became a tussle. But it wasn’t this or the fight to dress Amy that had filled Margaret with resentment. It was the way her second daughter had eyes only for Timothy. Let’s face it, Margaret had said to Bunny, I was an incubator and that’s about all.

  Mel ducks into his bedroom to change his shirt. He stands in front of the mirror stripped to the waist. He turns sideways, examining his profile, flexes his muscles, and checks to see if his pectorals are larger. He looks to see if something has changed because he has “banged” a girl. Then he feels a pressure in his chest, the imprint of a foot. Hangers clank in the closet as he pulls free a clean shirt. He tucks it down around his waist and turns to the mirror. He imagines he can see the treads of a sneaker.

  Jill sits on her bed holding a mirror to her groin. Blood pools beneath her skin, becoming an angry-looking bruise. She runs her finger across it lightly, back and forth, and feels something else. A lump. It will disappear when the bruise fades, she thinks. Jill believes that the lump is from the boy’s kick but the node has been swollen for a month or so and is rapidly growing larger.

  Amy washes her hands in the bathroom. The air is moist and smells of Chantilly, and bubbles from Margaret’s bath still cling to the side of the tub. When she steps from the bathroom she looks inside Margaret’s bedroom. The new blouse her mother made lies crumpled on the floor. The Blue Book, Margaret’s journal, lies open on the white bedspread. Amy’s stomach sings with hunger and so she decides that she’ll wait for another opportunity to discover what her mother has written in it today.

  They sit waiting around the table as Margaret unwraps a damp tea towel from a plate of sandwiches and sets the plate down. She hovers over her children, pouring ice tea into their glasses, and then sits down to watch them eat. Amy’s hands shake as she tears apart her sandwich and stuffs chunks of cheddar cheese, ham, and bread into her mouth.

  “So, what did you do today?” Margaret chooses
to ignore how Amy’s cheeks bulge with food, that she barely chews it before she swallows and reaches for another sandwich. Often, they lose their appetites when they watch Amy eat, and so they have learned not to watch when she sometimes stirs everything together into a soupy mush so she can eat it more quickly with a spoon. They can always tell where she has sat by the sticky globs of food left behind, the dribbles of milk, the litter of crusts or bits of fat or rind picked off and discarded.

  “We went to the zoo. We saw monkeys,” Jill says.

  “Baboons. They belong to the family of Cercopithecidae.” Mel’s voice is deep today. Baritone.

  “Oh really?” Margaret replies as though this information is surprising.

  “The usual picnic stuff.” He raises his arms, stretches.

  “And swans. We saw swans. They were in the duck pond.”

  “I have always loved the swans,” Margaret says to Jill. She leans into the chair hugging herself as though suddenly chilled. “And what did you see, Amy?”