Free Nashville Chrome by Rick Bass Page B

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