Nashville Chrome (21 page)

He got out on his own all right, and put off going to the hospital—why spend that kind of money if he didn't have to?—and instead was laid up at home for a few days. But the leg got infected and developed gangrene. By the time the Browns got him to the hospital, it was almost too late—the poison surged, too much of it was coursing through his body, toxins everywhere, and he needed steady transfusions to keep him alive.

It turned out he had a rare type of blood, one the doctors had never seen, and the only match that could be found was his brother—the one whose cabin had burned—and so his brother gave all that he could, which kept Floyd going for a couple more days, but then his brother could give no more and no other match could be found.

The doctors began calling all over the country, and amazingly, they found a match from a donor in Illinois and had the donor flown to Little Rock to donate all the blood he could spare.

It saved Floyd's life—the Illinois man alternating now with Floyd's brother—and the fever subsided, and he came home to heal up. And within a couple of months, he was back in the woods again, logging: more cautious than before, but still, pushing farther into the forest.

Helping Floyd with his walking therapy at the hospital, Bonnie fell down the steps one day, twisting her own ankle. Floyd's kind doctor was her own age, Gene "Brownie" Ring, and he attended to her.

He was neither flamboyant nor even terribly handsome—if anything, he was as quiet and reserved as Elvis was incandescent, as self-effacing as Elvis had been self-promoting—but the moment that Brownie first touched her ankle in the preliminary exam, she felt it, the ancient electricity. There was nothing but pleasure and longing in her from that touch, so much so that for long moments she forgot she was injured, and thought he might have healed her in that first instant.

T
HAT WINTER,
the Browns went back out touring radio stations—playing live, one song at a time, one broadcast at a time, schmoozing one station owner after another, singing into the darkness, it seemed to them, and looking back over their shoulder now at all the new stars who were following their lead, and singing with greater and greater verve, entertainers who were not in the least bit interested in either harmony or glide, musicians such as Jerry Lee Lewis, also up from out of the swamps. The Browns, though photogenic, just didn't translate to television, weren't comfortable twisting and shouting; and here, too, they were looking back over their shoulder and telling themselves to push harder, work harder, reach deeper.

Or rather, Maxine was. Jim Ed and Bonnie were starting to slow down a little. It wasn't the workload that was getting to them; it was the pace, it was the height of the flames.

Maxine, never a people person, was beginning to get a reputation among the station owners, all of whom were powerful old men, delighted by the novelty of touring young women, and delighted, too, by the novelty of one of those attractive young women asking the station owners for assistance. It was the same with the disc jockeys, and after a drink or three, they would inevitably cross the line with Maxine, to the point where—wired tighter and tighter each time she left home, left her children and Tommy and went out on the road, and wired tighter, too, from the first hint or suspicion that her hyperbolic rate of ascent had finally crested (and never mind that no one, or almost no one, other than Elvis was above them)—Maxine became even sharper in her criticisms, pushing to have their songs on the radio more. Her reputation grew as a woman with a hard edge. An unhappy woman, a difficult woman. She would not deign to catch flies with honey.

The Browns would travel for two weeks, then come home for a day or two. She would have a fight with Tommy, a meal with children she barely knew—they were changing so quickly—then back out for another week. There was no rhythm beneath or within any of them now; the only rhythm or harmony that existed was that which they could fabricate, as if from the ether, with their voices. There was nothing else.

Elvis was starting to pull away. All three Browns had watched his trajectory with only pride—success for any one of them was success for all. And though they each had different reactions to his ascent—Maxine was excited by and approving of it, Jim Ed found it amusing, and Bonnie was discomforted by it—something different was happening now. It wasn't so much that Elvis had risen above them, but that instead he was being carried away from them, no longer just some distance above them but drifting laterally. He had lost his anchor, his connection to them. He was lost in himself, and then—just one small false step, but so easy to make amid all that clamor and energy—he got lost in who his audience wanted him to be. This was not the same thing the world wanted him to be, and for that, he was doomed.

Bonnie's unease was extraordinarily complicated by the surprising reaction she had had, meeting Brownie Ring. She hadn't ever felt such insistent hunger with Elvis. She couldn't sleep well, thinking of the young doctor, and found that almost all her waking hours were spent in dreaming schemes or fantasies about how to see him again, and how long it might be. The simplest and best thing in the world would have been to let him go, though it occurred to her that her current boyfriend, Elvis, lived essentially a thousand miles away, or farther. Elvis in Japan, Elvis in Egypt. Elvis in Australia. It wasn't just the physical distance, though. It was something else. It was the same thing Maxine had.

She took the bold step of writing Brownie a note thanking him for the kind attention he had shown her father and her. She said that he might not remember her, but that she was sure he remembered her father, who was recuperating nicely.

"I don't remember any one-legged man," he wrote back. "I do remember tending to the ankle of a beautiful young woman from Poplar Creek," he wrote back. "I remember it well."

Each of the Browns saw Elvis now in a slightly different light, or chose to observe a different part of him, like the blind man with the elephant; but as to the moment when they first realized he not only had risen above them but was beginning to detach, drifting to the point where he might not ever be able to find his way back home, they would each concur. For them, that realization was as stark and dramatic as a fixed point on a timeline.

He had just gotten back from the army, where, while certainly not absent from the public eye, he had been a little constricted, after having previously known such freedom, such whirl, such roar. He had always been handsome, but now there was something else about him that drove girls and women wild, more than even before. Some desperation, some acknowledgment of waste or loss. It wasn't the seed or flaw of rot—it was something else. The pain of the knowledge of the wrong path chosen, perhaps, or at least the suspicion.

The women were throwing their clothes at him, screaming, drowning out the sound of his music. They swooned, fell over in dead faints; mass hysteria washed through the crowds like the fast-moving shadow of a lone cloud passing over a field.

When he came back to visit the Browns, it was as if he could still recognize them, could remember who they were and what they meant to him, but otherwise, there was some internal meter, some rhythm, that was different now, and that prevented him from moving in step with them, made it difficult even to converse. In its worst moments, it was like the dreams of opening one's mouth to call out but being unable to speak: no sound coming out.

They sat around the kitchen table and tried to talk about where they had each been and where they were going next, but that was all there was.

It seemed to each of the Browns almost as if there was a little bit of meanness in him now, whereas before there had never been such a thing. It wasn't really meanness—it was more just a fear that had gotten hold of him. Having made it to the top of the world, he'd seen how far he had to fall and couldn't bear the thought of not being loved. Every day had become double or nothing.

It made no sense. The Browns were selling almost as many records. It made no sense to Maxine.

It wasn't just Elvis who was drifting, however. It seemed that way to Jim Ed and Maxine, but what they didn't see was that Bonnie's attachment had loosened as well, and that she, too, like Elvis, was moving away from them all. Unlike Elvis, however, she was moving toward happiness, more of it than she already possessed and inhabited. It was still a dream world, this idea of a life with Brownie, but she could see the steps that were required to pass from that dream world into the real one, and it did not seem an insurmountable challenge.

The incident that clarified for each of them the magnitude of Elvis's drift, if not Bonnie's, came for them that same winter. The Browns were all three back home for a week, helping out around the house and playing a little music. They were resting up from the tour.

Tommy had disappeared the day after Maxine had arrived—they simply could not abide each other any longer—and Bonnie was helping Maxine take care of the babies. They'd been home for a few days when the phone rang in the middle of the night. It was Elvis calling for Floyd. He didn't even know the Browns were back home, and neither did he ask if they were. Elvis and his band were broken down outside of Shreveport and needed a ride. They had to be in Nashville the next afternoon, so Floyd and Bonnie drove out there to get him. They each took a car. Floyd would loan Elvis his new Oldsmobile. It rained cats and dogs the whole way.

When Floyd and Bonnie got there, they beheld a sorry mess. Elvis and his band had been sitting in their broken-down car all night, drinking, and from time to time they'd gotten out and stood in the rain, trying to tinker with the car's engine, something they knew absolutely nothing about, before getting drenched and climbing back into the car and drinking some more. There were three of them: Elvis; his bass player, Bill Black; and guitarist Scotty Moore. None of them was ready yet to be driving Floyd's Oldsmobile, so Floyd and Bonnie had to drive both cars all the way back to Poplar Creek and get them showered and fed and dressed before they were sober enough to take the car on up to Nashville.

Floyd and the Browns didn't really think much about it—the band was just boys being boys—and Elvis seemed grateful enough, and a little embarrassed at having gotten them up in the middle of the night. But it was good that he had someone to turn to when he needed help and they were glad he had called, were happy to help him anytime. He said thank you and goodbye, and that he would have the car back to Floyd in a week at the most, and then they headed on up the road.

Floyd didn't see him for another six months. None of them saw Elvis during that same period, but he'd made a movie while he was gone, and the next time he came through Pine Bluff he was in a pink Cadillac, riding around with Colonel Tom Parker, wearing the white suit and the big sunglasses. He had his picture in the paper, wearing those clothes and sitting on the fender of that new Cadillac, but despite being that close to Poplar Creek, had not made it by to see them. They waited, and worried, and nursed their disappointment, trying to make it smaller—trying to keep it in a separate compartment, each of them, from all the rest of him that each of them knew and loved—but like smoke, their disappointment seeped through the cracks and began to infiltrate everything.

Floyd waited another couple of weeks, then called Elvis and asked him where his car was, and Elvis said he'd have a driver return it to him. And he did, about a week later, but it didn't look like the same car. It had dings and dents in it, and was all scratched up, as if someone had been driving it through the brush. The tread was worn off the tires, and he had put 30,000 miles on the car. It was dusty and dirty; he hadn't even bothered to have it washed.

Even then, the Browns didn't blame him. They were sad and uneasy about who he was becoming—about who he had become—but they understood better than anyone the howling forces that were buffeting him: the winds that would either snuff out his fire or fan it into something unmanageable.

They viewed his drift as more of an illness than a character flaw. "He'd just gone crazy," Bonnie said whenever she talked about him to Maxine. "It was so sad, so disappointing."

There was a part of her that tried to hold on to him in her heart, late at night when she was alone—just before sleep—but the pragmatic part of her understood he was already gone, and that the pain she was feeling wasn't so much for herself, or even for him, but instead for something that simply wasn't there anymore.

At the same level, they must have understood that it wasn't just Elvis who was being lost to them, but that they, too, were somehow vanishing.

Jim Ed sanded and buffed the car himself once they got it back. By that time, they didn't have enough money to fix it.

"If you squint your eyes, or if the car is moving, you can't really tell," he said hopefully when he was finished.

"No," Bonnie said, "you can tell."

Floyd died in his sleep that winter, while the Browns were out on one of their circuits. He had fallen ill with a cold from having been out working in the woods in the rain, but had not seemed overly sick—he had been in bed for only a couple of days, with a fever and chills and a cough, nothing more. He had a drink of moonshine that night, with the cabin warm—Birdie had been keeping the woodstove in the bedroom popping, so that his uneasy sleep would have been punctuated by the sound of burning. Fever and chills, up and down, throwing the heavy quilts off, then pulling them back over him, before finally hitting a kind of calm glide and sleeping easily.

He felt that he might have turned the corner and was possibly even anticipating work the next day—the winter rain continuing to beat down on the roof, but no matter, he was warm and dry—but then there was only silence. He simply left them, with no drama or outrage, no sentimental preparations, no turmoil; as if all of those things that had constituted their days together, in all the moments and years preceding this one, had not been how he was, but as if instead the quiet truth had finally been revealed, despite the condition of his disease: that beneath the drinking and the drama—beneath the fear of what, he never knew—he had been a hard worker and a provider. A shelter, even if a flawed one, for their greatness. And above all, a fan.