by Rick Bass
He cocks his head and listens as she speaks to him, tells him Good morning, Mister Buddy, lavishes a few old-woman's endearments on him—"Aren't you a handsome fellow this morning! How is your day going, what have you seen?"—and then lowers the paper plate to where he is waiting, the place where he always receives it, next to the water bowl that she always keeps filled; and he drops his head quickly then and eats steadily, though neatly, spilling nothing.
When he is done, he lifts his head and licks his lips and beholds her for a moment, waiting for more—she laughs but never gives him more: "You've got to stay trim, Mister Buddy"—and then he is off, and Maxine, through long practice, has become accustomed to pretending that she's all right with that, and that she doesn't wish he were hers or that she had a fence around her yard which, after entering, he could not exit.
She pretends that she does not want the responsibility of having him around more often than he is, that his brief daily visits each morning are just right. She pretends that it's exactly the way she would have designed things if the choice were up to her.
Then he is gone, and the long day begins. With some luck she will see him again, later in the afternoon, when he passes back through her yard, hurrying toward his home to arrive there before his owners' children get in from school—but those passages are fleeting, and rarely does he have time to stop, even on the occasions when she sets out enticements.
What to do with such long days, and such longer waiting? Sometimes—even now, after nearly fifty years of being forgotten—she sends handwritten notes, in old-woman shaky-scrawl, to the addresses of nightclubs that she remembers, or to music companies, requesting work, asking for another chance, another gig, another audience, another anything; though there is nothing, only a terrifying absence. The letters almost always come back unopened, Return to Sender, though occasionally there will be a form rejection or, ever so infrequently, a short personal rejection.
She doesn't mail the letters out as much as she used to—stamps have gotten so expensive—but now and again she still does: she just can't help it.
She knows she could still sing. Can still sing. She sings to herself. Hers is an old voice now, but she still feels a power in her. It's trapped down in there. It won't ever leave, not while she's alive.
She sings as long as she can, until she becomes dismayed by the diminishment—five, ten good minutes, with rests—and then falls quiet again, putters around in the dark house, waits for the mailman, and in the afternoons, looks out the back window at the bright heat of the day, hoping for a glimpse of Buddy passing by.
THE NEW BUILDING
THERE IS A BALANCE in the world, and no work is ever wasted. Fabor had imprisoned their careers even as they were first blooming, and there would be others who would trip the Browns up as they were ascending, who would pull them down just when they had gotten a leg up—but it worked the other way too. Whenever they got too far down, someone always happened by to give them a hand back up. Along with the unpredictability and controlling nature of Floyd came the unconditional love of Birdie, and her ceaseless work on their behalf and on behalf of the nuclear shell of their family.
Life at the mill was getting hard again. Floyd loved being in the woods, but always, the work eventually proved to be incompatible with his alcoholism. Inattentive due to drink, he lost two fingers on his left hand, a match now with the two he had lost on his right hand some years earlier, and so he packed his family up and moved up to Pine Bluff, began building another restaurant on the foundation of the old one, and named it the Trio Club in honor of Maxine, Bonnie, and Jim Ed.
Floyd milled the lumber for the restaurant and drove it into town, and the whole family pitched in with the construction, with Birdie working hardest of all, up before anyone else and staying out on the job long after the others had worn out.
She got tired, but she didn't know how to quit. It'll be beautiful, she kept saying. Floyd and Jim Ed did the wiring and plumbing, and, spurred largely by Birdie, they had the place open a month after driving the first nail. As there was always a balance, or a striving-for-balance, in their up-and-down lives, so too was there a similar meter in their family. Whatever Floyd and later Maxine put at risk, or even damaged or sought to destroy or turn their back on, Birdie and Bonnie would always be ready to help put back together. The oscillation in their lives was remarkable, though as close as they were to it, they never noticed it, but instead simply continued to move forward each day, always looking one day ahead.
Floyd and Birdie put a new sign over the threshold, brightly painted light bulbs made to look like neon, arranged to represent in crude silhouette the profiles of the three oldest Browns, with a treble clef and three notes next to the glow-in-the-dark dazzling illumination: red, green, gold, orange, pink. Moths swarmed the lights, fell in thick clutters to the ground. Birdie swept them each morning, kept the light bulbs dusted and clean, unscrewed them and painted them anew every two months, sometimes experimenting with the arrangements to give each silhouette a slightly different effect—one more lurid, one more ebullient, one purer. It was amazing what a little variance could achieve, even with the borders of the illumination remaining unchanged and unalterable.
People came to eat Birdie's pies, but also to listen, in the evenings, to the Browns' soothing harmonies: singers and musicians who would go on to become the stars of the next decade. There was just something so slick, so smooth, about the up-and-down registry of the sound. Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Patsy Cline, Buddy Holly, and the Davis Sisters came to hear them. It was a tight little core; the seeds of what would become the multibillion-dollar Nashville country music industry came through there and were touched by the Browns—coming like the lost young people they all were back then, coming more to touch the Browns than to be touched, like animals in the wild forest coming to crouch and drink at the head of a fountain, the only wellspring for miles around, and doing so in a time of drought, and with fires burning all around.
They came, they brushed up against the Browns, and then they went on their way—magic-brushed, and forged from a fire they sometimes didn't even realize they'd touched, though others of them understood right from the very beginning the nature of the raw talent they were witnessing.
The new restaurant had been open only a few weeks when the one who would change everything, and who would never be forgotten, drifted through. He was nothing, just a kid with a guitar—one of maybe hundreds who traveled that path up through Pine Bluff—and those inclined to disbelieve in predestination might do well to reconsider the path that took him straight to the Browns. He had been born only a hundred or so miles to the east and had lived his seventeen years with some passion, and some magic, but nothing like what would come after his life intersected theirs.
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 walki
ng, 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, a
nd 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.
SHINING ON
IT'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.