Free Nashville Chrome by Rick Bass

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