Free Nashville Chrome by Rick Bass Page A

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