Nashville Chrome by Rick Bass

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, and 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
    I T'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.
    Best of all, of course, the stages: in London and Frankfurt, in Hot Springs and Nacogdoches, in Memphis, New Orleans, Knoxville, Nashville, Savannah, and Jackson. The particular pleasure of a new stage, the flooring unfamiliar, and the curve of walls and arc of roof likewise not yet known. The strangest details impressing themselves upon her, in that heightened state of awareness, that hyperacuity, as the adrenaline began to burn and the pupils constricted. Noticing a bat-shaped swirl in the growth rings of the oak flooring beneath her feet, or a dent in the steel mesh of the waiting microphone. The usher in Fayetteville who looked so much like Floyd, with his red jacket and slicked-back white hair. The WPA mural of John Henry on the high wall of the Cactus Theater in Lubbock. Her heart terrified, beating a million times a minute as she wondered what the audience would be like, wondering,
Will they love us?
Terrified, and grateful to her brother and sister beside her, as she stepped forward to find out.
    Of the time that